Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 2
February 25, 2016
Thorstein Veblen hates my lawn
Hello there readers -I began this post on a cool fine day where I live in New Zealand, having just emailed my new novel to what are called “beta readers”. These are people who are meant to read your work and if you are lucky, savage it so that you can make it good or at least improve it, rather than totally embarrass yourself. Partial embarrassment is better than total embarrassment apparently.
“Why Steve your left ear is red!”
So I was waiting with the proverbial breath for their verdicts and comments.
While doing that, I mowed my lawn. When I do this steam percolates from my spirit into the ether and adds to the planet’s global heating misery. My unhappiness at mowing sends me to thinking about Thorstein Veblen and how he would sneer at doing anything at all relating to a lawn.
If you don’t know about Thorstein Veblen you can do worse than slip out of this wee blog to Wiki and have a read. What a dude!
Veblen came to the world’s notice with a book, Theory of the Leisure Class, and it was a cracker. He wrote heaps of other books but none of them has ever had the cachet of that one. Its significant contribution was to consider our modern society in the same light as one would consider a tribe of jungle dwellers. It was both hilarious and embarrassing at the same time. No one can read Leisure Class seriously without feeling very uncomfortable. The things we do! The habits we have that we think are “cultured” are explained by Veblen in ways that are at once convincing and devastating.
Veblen coined a number of expressions to colour in his thesis, the most famous being “conspicuous consumption”. The idea is that people with real money – the leisure class not needing to work – are compelled to show off their wealth by spending what they don’t need to spend. While others might decry the waste involved in this, as if it is accidental and inefficient, Veblen realised that the waste was the point.
Turning his exacting eye on fashion, he traced the evolution of the bustle of his time from a wee bump on the bum to an exaggerated promontory capable of hosting a luncheon by the unfortunate wearer’s companions. This article of clothing actually created new architectural features in homes so that the bustler could get from one room to another.
The point of this torture device was to display to any and all the fact that the wearer did not need to do any physical work. The woman was thus a symbol of the man’s wealth, and an appendage to him, like something in a museum. And to show that a man had more of everything than a rival, the bustle needed to be a bit larger, and then a bit larger still, until finally. . .*
Tribal people use similar devices to make women of the wealthy and powerful immobile – for example by putting gold necklaces layer upon layer around the unfortunate woman’s neck until she cannot move, thus showing how much wealth the owner (literally) possesses, making the female a sort of display cabinet, and a challenge to a rival: If you want the gold, get the woman. Or die.
Veblen didn’t stop there. He argued – persuasively say I – that the waste of the leisure class was emulated by those beneath them, who couldn’t actually afford waste, but could manage to represent it. Workers’ cottages, to take another example, could have little pointless features like wrought ironwork over the porch, serving no purpose but display. Clothing was similar – if a man couldn’t afford to have his wife immobilised all the time, perhaps she could be movement free some of the time. And if that wasn’t possible, how about putting something on the clothing that showed the desire to do it, or at least to waste something, somehow. . .
Once seen in this way, fashion becomes completely new. To be fashionable involves being wasteful. Pointlessness is the point!
The women among my readers may wish to reflect on the otherwise pointless decoration of their underthings. I have asked a large number of women if they wear “frilly knickers” – they do, and they don’t really know why until there is a discussion about dear Thorstein.
Veblen’s insight is at best a guilty secret in the fashion world. His name is never mentioned by those supposedly in the know about this exotic arena of life. The “experts” have probably never heard of him, or of Quentin Bell, the nephew of Viriginia Woolf who wrote an admiring account of Veblen’s fashion expose, On human finery. But once you, dear reader, know the truth, looking at clothes will never be the same again.
Veblen wrote at the time of a global revolt by women against the slavery of their clothing. The “rational dress” movement punctured the fashion balloon, but society’s unending demand to keep up with Mr and Ms Jones won out. . .today, our clothing is more reasonable if not rational. Women still however imprison themselves in bizarre contraptions, especially for “special occasions”, when they adorn themselves in ways that are pointedly pointless. Men are less susceptible to this demand but still affected. The time when men and women wore very similar clothing – a kind of dress that went down to the ankles, as in renaissance Italy – has gone, though it may return. Nonetheless, for men the point of “formal wear” is partly that it is uncomfortable as the “need” to wear a tie in many occupations attests. “I am doing this to show that I am willing to humiliate myself to be here.” The tie is now thankfully in retreat.
Where was I? Ah yes, my lawn. For most people, the lawn is something that has always been there, a bit of grass surrounding a house. This is a delusion. The lawn is a relatively recent invention and the man responsible, or most responsible, was one Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Brown was an 18th century landscape architect who transformed the British sense of space with close to 200 estates and parklands. Many of these still exist. Working for the new rich of his time, whose wealth included landed property, he produced the wonderful “natural” and graceful vistas we associate with Jane Austen novels and films.
Brown was a genius and his gardens beautiful. He cannot be held morally responsible for the ripple effect that created, for example, the grass around my house that I have to mow when it gets too long. But it is his doing. Brown’s wealthy patrons liked these vast open spaces that showed they did not need them. By the time they arrived at my humble cottage on the edge of the central city of Palmerston North, New Zealand, they no longer are vast, not spacious, but very definitely pointless. They show, that the occupant – myself – has the time, the energy, the equipment, and the self-abasement to cut it.
Veblen’s sneer is justified. As I push the mower along, I ponder, every single time, what I can do to avoid this humiliating extravagance. I would like to put the whole thing into shrubs producing fruit, and just may. Sadly there is a kerbside border belonging to the council that I will not be able to do that with, but the rest. . .
Meanwhile as I go along I still beat myself up, thinking of Veblen and my own miniature replication of conspicuous consumption. One day: cranberries. Or something. . .
Thanks for reading.
*An adjunct of Veblen’s analysis is that a fashion trend starts small and gets extreme before collapsing. The bustle reached extraordinary size and then disappeared. In the 1960s the miniskirt became very, very mini before dropping down to the ankles. Bell’s account says that we are fortunate to live in a time where fashion is less demanding and people can wear what they like more or less. There is definitely something in what he says.
“Why Steve your left ear is red!”
So I was waiting with the proverbial breath for their verdicts and comments.
While doing that, I mowed my lawn. When I do this steam percolates from my spirit into the ether and adds to the planet’s global heating misery. My unhappiness at mowing sends me to thinking about Thorstein Veblen and how he would sneer at doing anything at all relating to a lawn.
If you don’t know about Thorstein Veblen you can do worse than slip out of this wee blog to Wiki and have a read. What a dude!
Veblen came to the world’s notice with a book, Theory of the Leisure Class, and it was a cracker. He wrote heaps of other books but none of them has ever had the cachet of that one. Its significant contribution was to consider our modern society in the same light as one would consider a tribe of jungle dwellers. It was both hilarious and embarrassing at the same time. No one can read Leisure Class seriously without feeling very uncomfortable. The things we do! The habits we have that we think are “cultured” are explained by Veblen in ways that are at once convincing and devastating.
Veblen coined a number of expressions to colour in his thesis, the most famous being “conspicuous consumption”. The idea is that people with real money – the leisure class not needing to work – are compelled to show off their wealth by spending what they don’t need to spend. While others might decry the waste involved in this, as if it is accidental and inefficient, Veblen realised that the waste was the point.
Turning his exacting eye on fashion, he traced the evolution of the bustle of his time from a wee bump on the bum to an exaggerated promontory capable of hosting a luncheon by the unfortunate wearer’s companions. This article of clothing actually created new architectural features in homes so that the bustler could get from one room to another.
The point of this torture device was to display to any and all the fact that the wearer did not need to do any physical work. The woman was thus a symbol of the man’s wealth, and an appendage to him, like something in a museum. And to show that a man had more of everything than a rival, the bustle needed to be a bit larger, and then a bit larger still, until finally. . .*
Tribal people use similar devices to make women of the wealthy and powerful immobile – for example by putting gold necklaces layer upon layer around the unfortunate woman’s neck until she cannot move, thus showing how much wealth the owner (literally) possesses, making the female a sort of display cabinet, and a challenge to a rival: If you want the gold, get the woman. Or die.
Veblen didn’t stop there. He argued – persuasively say I – that the waste of the leisure class was emulated by those beneath them, who couldn’t actually afford waste, but could manage to represent it. Workers’ cottages, to take another example, could have little pointless features like wrought ironwork over the porch, serving no purpose but display. Clothing was similar – if a man couldn’t afford to have his wife immobilised all the time, perhaps she could be movement free some of the time. And if that wasn’t possible, how about putting something on the clothing that showed the desire to do it, or at least to waste something, somehow. . .
Once seen in this way, fashion becomes completely new. To be fashionable involves being wasteful. Pointlessness is the point!
The women among my readers may wish to reflect on the otherwise pointless decoration of their underthings. I have asked a large number of women if they wear “frilly knickers” – they do, and they don’t really know why until there is a discussion about dear Thorstein.
Veblen’s insight is at best a guilty secret in the fashion world. His name is never mentioned by those supposedly in the know about this exotic arena of life. The “experts” have probably never heard of him, or of Quentin Bell, the nephew of Viriginia Woolf who wrote an admiring account of Veblen’s fashion expose, On human finery. But once you, dear reader, know the truth, looking at clothes will never be the same again.
Veblen wrote at the time of a global revolt by women against the slavery of their clothing. The “rational dress” movement punctured the fashion balloon, but society’s unending demand to keep up with Mr and Ms Jones won out. . .today, our clothing is more reasonable if not rational. Women still however imprison themselves in bizarre contraptions, especially for “special occasions”, when they adorn themselves in ways that are pointedly pointless. Men are less susceptible to this demand but still affected. The time when men and women wore very similar clothing – a kind of dress that went down to the ankles, as in renaissance Italy – has gone, though it may return. Nonetheless, for men the point of “formal wear” is partly that it is uncomfortable as the “need” to wear a tie in many occupations attests. “I am doing this to show that I am willing to humiliate myself to be here.” The tie is now thankfully in retreat.
Where was I? Ah yes, my lawn. For most people, the lawn is something that has always been there, a bit of grass surrounding a house. This is a delusion. The lawn is a relatively recent invention and the man responsible, or most responsible, was one Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Brown was an 18th century landscape architect who transformed the British sense of space with close to 200 estates and parklands. Many of these still exist. Working for the new rich of his time, whose wealth included landed property, he produced the wonderful “natural” and graceful vistas we associate with Jane Austen novels and films.
Brown was a genius and his gardens beautiful. He cannot be held morally responsible for the ripple effect that created, for example, the grass around my house that I have to mow when it gets too long. But it is his doing. Brown’s wealthy patrons liked these vast open spaces that showed they did not need them. By the time they arrived at my humble cottage on the edge of the central city of Palmerston North, New Zealand, they no longer are vast, not spacious, but very definitely pointless. They show, that the occupant – myself – has the time, the energy, the equipment, and the self-abasement to cut it.
Veblen’s sneer is justified. As I push the mower along, I ponder, every single time, what I can do to avoid this humiliating extravagance. I would like to put the whole thing into shrubs producing fruit, and just may. Sadly there is a kerbside border belonging to the council that I will not be able to do that with, but the rest. . .
Meanwhile as I go along I still beat myself up, thinking of Veblen and my own miniature replication of conspicuous consumption. One day: cranberries. Or something. . .
Thanks for reading.
*An adjunct of Veblen’s analysis is that a fashion trend starts small and gets extreme before collapsing. The bustle reached extraordinary size and then disappeared. In the 1960s the miniskirt became very, very mini before dropping down to the ankles. Bell’s account says that we are fortunate to live in a time where fashion is less demanding and people can wear what they like more or less. There is definitely something in what he says.
January 22, 2016
The race is on! or off
Hello dear reader - It truly is delightful to be back with you again, here in the comfort and warming security of a blog about writing.
Just now I am working on a novel about the end of the human race. It is exciting to write as I hope it will be exciting to read, and my deadline is for sometime this year.
However while I have been writing the human race has been upping the ante. It is hard to write fiction these days that is not eclipsed by reality. Usually I steer clear of politics in this blog though anyone can see where I am coming from in my books.
But. . .I thought I had a topic that could withstand any amount of heat from the real world, if only by slapping on some more sunscreen lotion. I mean, what is more final than the end of the human race?
Events of the last year and the beginning of this have made me wonder if I am so far out of the loop of life that I cannot see the noose being tightened around our collective necks.
The most powerful country in the world - or should I say wuuurrld - the United States, is holding its leadership election this year and the front runner of one of the parties appears to be a raving lunatic. I am not saying which party this is, as the front runner of the other party also appears to be less than the full quid. One of these upstanding individuals appears to have hit on a new way of reaching the top: if it moves, insult it. It's working a treat so far.
Of course that is only the most powerful country in the world. There are plenty of others to go around! The middle east - wow! Syria. . .Yemen! Yemen is off the news wires because no one is safe there I think, but that unfortunate land has more than 20 million people who depend on imported food and water and the main ports are damaged for a large part of the population. There are at least four warring factions and one of these is backed by Saudi Arabia, which is bombing anything that moves.
Saudi, meanwhile, is pumping oil like there is no tomorrow, driving down the price to give the Russians a run for their lack of money and the newly back on stream Iranians a show of fingers.
Russia is bombing Syria. It claims to be bombing the wild-eyed - that's all you see, usually - jihadis and their supporters of the Islamic State, but they are also reportedly bombing the people who are fighting the Syrian government. Russia likes the Syrian government. It has given them a port, their only one in the Mediterranean, on a 50 year lease, and they'd like to keep it.
The Syrian government is led by people who profess a type of Islam known as Alawite. It does not seem too clear what this is about, except that it is a kind of Shiite faith.
That means most of the rebels the Russians are also bombing are Sunni, like the Saudi Arabians. So the Saudi Arabians, who have more Sunnis causing trouble in the world than they have people in Saudi Arabia it seems, are unhappy about this.
Next door in Iraq, Shiite and Sunni are also squabbling and fighting the Islamic State, which is Sunni.
If that was all I maybe wouldn't have a headache. In Africa. . .well, I would rather not talk about Africa just now. Forgive me.
Asia - the recent "save the world from crisping" meeting in Paris has joyously concluded that we are indeed turning the earth to toast and that we should do something about it. China has celebrated this by deciding to build another 250 plus coal fired power stations, and India plans to double its coal throughput.
They say they will do something about their emissions. That's good news!
If only that were all. Europe! The cradle of western civilisation is reeling from Islamic terror, Syrian refugees, Russian-provoked conflict in Ukraine, and the resulting tensions between the newly aggressive bear and family and all those to the west who don't like them very much.
Korea! I forgot Korea! North. . .Kim Wrong-un has pouted, and when he pouts, his country explodes a nuclear device. In this case he claims it to be a hydrogen bomb rather than an atomic bomb - the kind that obliterates millions upon millions of people.
All this, and yes, more. . .but I am weary with these details. The point is that as I slave, desperately and with artistic if sub-literary intent, on a novel about the end of mankind, mankind seems racing to beat me! Any one of these alarming and indeed harrowing traumas shaking our faith in ourselves could spin so out of control that the end would really be the end. In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, a novelist could beaver away without needing to worry that before she or he could crank the thing out that the whole of humanity would be unavailable to read it. I don't want to appear selfish, but that really does seem very unfair.
Celine, the writer I keep dragging into this blog, began one of his last novels (North):
"Sure, I tell myself, it'll all be over soon. . .whew! we have seen enough. . .at sixty-five and then some, what difference can the worst H. ..Z. . .or Y superbomb make. . ."
The consolation is that Celine wrote this in the 1950s, well over a half century ago and as a species we are still here, for a little while anyway. So there is hope for us all, and for me to finish my book. Maybe.
Humanity. . .our species. . wow. . .Could you make it up?
Thanks for reading.
Just now I am working on a novel about the end of the human race. It is exciting to write as I hope it will be exciting to read, and my deadline is for sometime this year.
However while I have been writing the human race has been upping the ante. It is hard to write fiction these days that is not eclipsed by reality. Usually I steer clear of politics in this blog though anyone can see where I am coming from in my books.
But. . .I thought I had a topic that could withstand any amount of heat from the real world, if only by slapping on some more sunscreen lotion. I mean, what is more final than the end of the human race?
Events of the last year and the beginning of this have made me wonder if I am so far out of the loop of life that I cannot see the noose being tightened around our collective necks.
The most powerful country in the world - or should I say wuuurrld - the United States, is holding its leadership election this year and the front runner of one of the parties appears to be a raving lunatic. I am not saying which party this is, as the front runner of the other party also appears to be less than the full quid. One of these upstanding individuals appears to have hit on a new way of reaching the top: if it moves, insult it. It's working a treat so far.
Of course that is only the most powerful country in the world. There are plenty of others to go around! The middle east - wow! Syria. . .Yemen! Yemen is off the news wires because no one is safe there I think, but that unfortunate land has more than 20 million people who depend on imported food and water and the main ports are damaged for a large part of the population. There are at least four warring factions and one of these is backed by Saudi Arabia, which is bombing anything that moves.
Saudi, meanwhile, is pumping oil like there is no tomorrow, driving down the price to give the Russians a run for their lack of money and the newly back on stream Iranians a show of fingers.
Russia is bombing Syria. It claims to be bombing the wild-eyed - that's all you see, usually - jihadis and their supporters of the Islamic State, but they are also reportedly bombing the people who are fighting the Syrian government. Russia likes the Syrian government. It has given them a port, their only one in the Mediterranean, on a 50 year lease, and they'd like to keep it.
The Syrian government is led by people who profess a type of Islam known as Alawite. It does not seem too clear what this is about, except that it is a kind of Shiite faith.
That means most of the rebels the Russians are also bombing are Sunni, like the Saudi Arabians. So the Saudi Arabians, who have more Sunnis causing trouble in the world than they have people in Saudi Arabia it seems, are unhappy about this.
Next door in Iraq, Shiite and Sunni are also squabbling and fighting the Islamic State, which is Sunni.
If that was all I maybe wouldn't have a headache. In Africa. . .well, I would rather not talk about Africa just now. Forgive me.
Asia - the recent "save the world from crisping" meeting in Paris has joyously concluded that we are indeed turning the earth to toast and that we should do something about it. China has celebrated this by deciding to build another 250 plus coal fired power stations, and India plans to double its coal throughput.
They say they will do something about their emissions. That's good news!
If only that were all. Europe! The cradle of western civilisation is reeling from Islamic terror, Syrian refugees, Russian-provoked conflict in Ukraine, and the resulting tensions between the newly aggressive bear and family and all those to the west who don't like them very much.
Korea! I forgot Korea! North. . .Kim Wrong-un has pouted, and when he pouts, his country explodes a nuclear device. In this case he claims it to be a hydrogen bomb rather than an atomic bomb - the kind that obliterates millions upon millions of people.
All this, and yes, more. . .but I am weary with these details. The point is that as I slave, desperately and with artistic if sub-literary intent, on a novel about the end of mankind, mankind seems racing to beat me! Any one of these alarming and indeed harrowing traumas shaking our faith in ourselves could spin so out of control that the end would really be the end. In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, a novelist could beaver away without needing to worry that before she or he could crank the thing out that the whole of humanity would be unavailable to read it. I don't want to appear selfish, but that really does seem very unfair.
Celine, the writer I keep dragging into this blog, began one of his last novels (North):
"Sure, I tell myself, it'll all be over soon. . .whew! we have seen enough. . .at sixty-five and then some, what difference can the worst H. ..Z. . .or Y superbomb make. . ."
The consolation is that Celine wrote this in the 1950s, well over a half century ago and as a species we are still here, for a little while anyway. So there is hope for us all, and for me to finish my book. Maybe.
Humanity. . .our species. . wow. . .Could you make it up?
Thanks for reading.
December 22, 2015
Say what?
Recently a friend suggested I write "stream of consciousness". and discussed a successful novel by a New Zealander that seemed to him marred by a structure imposed on the writer's stream of consciousness style. Not having read this writer, I don't know what to say about that particular book.
My friend's suggestion did make me think a bit, not only about my own writing, which has been heading in a different direction really, but about the writing known as stream of consciousness.
The thing about it is that it seldom, if ever, is what it seems. Of the writers I am familiar with who could be grouped under this rubric, none gives any evidence of really having written just as it came into her or his head. If any wrote a first draft like that, it changed fast enough before publication.
As readers of this blog will know, I greatly admire the French writer, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Celine was many things as a man, among them an anti-Semite, and the unpalatable parts of his personality I don't admire at all. but as a writer, he had a gift that many other writers would love to share. Some of his most devoted followers and emulators were themselves Jewish - one admirer, a teacher at Brandeis University in its early days, visited Celine in exile in Denmark and wrote a not especially good book about his disillusion with the writer as man, as if this should have been a surprise,*
Celine was a complex character and delving into his ideas about writing has any number of traps. He made things up, at will - about himself, his style, his reputation, his influence. What he really thought is never quite certain. Did he mean it when he said in his last book, "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school"? Or did he mean it when he said, "My three little dots. All the real writers will tell you what to think of them."
When Celine sounded serious, there was some meat to these bones. He said once that he might write 800,000 thousand words, only to pare them down to less than a quarter that number. And he went on to say that when people admired his style because it seemed as if he was talking, that he actually contrived this so as to give readers not the word they expected, but a different word.
Maybe getting it from 800,000 to less than 200,000 meant the result of stream of consciousness was only realised through rivers of sweat.
There are many writers who have been influenced by Celine and whose work seems "stream of consciousness". Americans Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are perhaps the two best known. To me, they are a struggle to get through - their work lacks the immediacy and fun of Celine's best writing, perhaps because they really did just write it and put it out there, though I don't really believe this. Serious writers write seriously. They try. They struggle.
I don't know where my best writing comes from. From my brain obviously but from some time or place in it, where some little pinprick of inspiration puts a few things together. But I do know that as with Celine good writing does not come by itself; it comes through toil and revision. Writing is easy. Good writing is hard. Making words work together as they ought is the best thing I do, but I know that I fail and go on failing, and that my successes are only partial.
The book I am writing is on its fifth version. The fourth attempt I abandoned after nearly 10,000 words. This one is past 11,000 and it feels better, somehow. A lot of the writing is not much good, but the bible of writing I follow says to keep going, and that's what I am doing. There is another draft, and then another, and another and another. . .and in the end, if it's no good, there is version six!
Well, I would like that not to happen. The drafts are fine, but throwing away a manuscript. . .it's hard. This version really does seem better even if there are some things I don't like much about it, so far. Raymond Chandler is alleged to have written that when stuck for what to do next, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. It's tempting; I've been thinking just along those lines. . .
Thanks for reading.
* Milton Hindus, Crippled Giant.
My friend's suggestion did make me think a bit, not only about my own writing, which has been heading in a different direction really, but about the writing known as stream of consciousness.
The thing about it is that it seldom, if ever, is what it seems. Of the writers I am familiar with who could be grouped under this rubric, none gives any evidence of really having written just as it came into her or his head. If any wrote a first draft like that, it changed fast enough before publication.
As readers of this blog will know, I greatly admire the French writer, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Celine was many things as a man, among them an anti-Semite, and the unpalatable parts of his personality I don't admire at all. but as a writer, he had a gift that many other writers would love to share. Some of his most devoted followers and emulators were themselves Jewish - one admirer, a teacher at Brandeis University in its early days, visited Celine in exile in Denmark and wrote a not especially good book about his disillusion with the writer as man, as if this should have been a surprise,*
Celine was a complex character and delving into his ideas about writing has any number of traps. He made things up, at will - about himself, his style, his reputation, his influence. What he really thought is never quite certain. Did he mean it when he said in his last book, "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school"? Or did he mean it when he said, "My three little dots. All the real writers will tell you what to think of them."
When Celine sounded serious, there was some meat to these bones. He said once that he might write 800,000 thousand words, only to pare them down to less than a quarter that number. And he went on to say that when people admired his style because it seemed as if he was talking, that he actually contrived this so as to give readers not the word they expected, but a different word.
Maybe getting it from 800,000 to less than 200,000 meant the result of stream of consciousness was only realised through rivers of sweat.
There are many writers who have been influenced by Celine and whose work seems "stream of consciousness". Americans Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are perhaps the two best known. To me, they are a struggle to get through - their work lacks the immediacy and fun of Celine's best writing, perhaps because they really did just write it and put it out there, though I don't really believe this. Serious writers write seriously. They try. They struggle.
I don't know where my best writing comes from. From my brain obviously but from some time or place in it, where some little pinprick of inspiration puts a few things together. But I do know that as with Celine good writing does not come by itself; it comes through toil and revision. Writing is easy. Good writing is hard. Making words work together as they ought is the best thing I do, but I know that I fail and go on failing, and that my successes are only partial.
The book I am writing is on its fifth version. The fourth attempt I abandoned after nearly 10,000 words. This one is past 11,000 and it feels better, somehow. A lot of the writing is not much good, but the bible of writing I follow says to keep going, and that's what I am doing. There is another draft, and then another, and another and another. . .and in the end, if it's no good, there is version six!
Well, I would like that not to happen. The drafts are fine, but throwing away a manuscript. . .it's hard. This version really does seem better even if there are some things I don't like much about it, so far. Raymond Chandler is alleged to have written that when stuck for what to do next, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. It's tempting; I've been thinking just along those lines. . .
Thanks for reading.
* Milton Hindus, Crippled Giant.
November 26, 2015
Unmanageability – a guide for advanced practitioners, taken from Shakespeare
Dear reader: If you don’t know by now that next April marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, well – you actually do!
It will be a wonderful occasion – after all those years, and the countless words spilt on innumerable pages, real and surreal, he remains the greatest writer ever, and that is saying a lot. Not everything he wrote had the golden touch of his best but in a relatively short life, he produced so much outstanding literature it is difficult to credit, though it is true.
It is also true that there is a lot that is unknown about Shakespeare. That has allowed people who should know better to create fabulous alternative authors, from Bacon to other nobles otherwise unheard of. Not too long ago the film Anonymous put just such a case. Trying to be as generous of spirit as possible, that is complete rubbish.
Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with others, but it did not take long for him to be regarded as the senior partner in that kind of enterprise. He had a gift that was just astonishing, even to his peers. It is also true that theatrical practice at the time meant companies “woodshedded” their productions. Shakespeare as an actor as well as playwright would have taken a full part in these and no doubt there would have been changes to lines and scenes as a result. Plays were more of a collaborative enterprise then than they typically are today. That is a very far cry from a secret author cunningly slipping scripts to an otherwise undistinguished actor and entrepreneur.
Shakespeare’s work seems inexhaustibly multifaceted. A few of his plays have been portrayed as both comedies and tragedies, and I’ve written a blog post about this (“Toiling with Troilus”), but more nuanced interpretations of his work allows for remarkably wide-ranging productions. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet creda\ibly set the famous romance in modern Venice, California’s gang turf (to be fair, Bernstein’s West Side Story did the same on New York streets without crediting the Bard). Productions change their historical garb with remarkable ease, and make their cases to be understood and appreciated.
Even so, there are those who don’t like him.
Recently I had a brief conversation with a dramatist and actor who found him “too wordy”. Wow! It reminded me of the joke about someone who saw a production of Hamlet and was bored – “It’s full of cliches”.
An Irish critic titled a book on the plays Shakespeare is hard – but so is life. What was easy for readers and viewers to comprehend in Shakespeare’s lifetime now needs guidance to fully appreciate. But to suggest he is boring is just wrong. Part of the reason for the bard’s success was that he did it all – actor, theatre impresario, writer – so knew how to put “bums on seats” in competition with other attractions seeking punters’ pennies – bear-baiting for example. The groundlings – illterate kids and the like – needed excitement and Shakespeare gave it to them. The literate wanted more, and they got it too. But for us, changes in our spoken and written language and in theatre convention really mean using critical editions, and then our brains, to get what is there to be got.
There really is a very great deal. In “Toiling with Troilus” I’ve tried to show my appreciation of Troilus and Cressida, a play even many educated people have never heard of. This time I’d like to wander around Hamlet, arguably the world’s best-known dramatic work, and in its “existentialist” cloth, as fresh and relevant as when actors first trod the boards reciting the lines.
Discovering the “real” Hamlet is a detective story and no single explanation or text is ever likely to please everyone. Harold Jenkins’ wonderful Arden edition is my favourite and persuasively suggests that one printed edition, from Germany, was actually an inaccurate theft – a so-called memorial reconstruction – by one of the actors who appeared in the first production of the play. Jenkins even shows the role played by the actor who was the thief, as the man remembered the lines of the play closest to his own, and flubbed those where he was not involved. There is more in Jenkins’ absorbing account.
It is a commonplace to say that Hamlet the character was indecisive. That is not entirely fair. Hamlet was caught in a difficult situation. His father the king had died suddenly and he, the inheriting son, was deprived of the crown by his uncle, who had married his mother with unseemly haste after his father’s death. Brooding on this, he is confronted by the ghost of his father who says he’s been murdered, and insists on revenge.
Rationalist that he is, Hamlet needs to decide whether this vision is real or not, and if real, whether it might be a trick by a demon rather than a true visitation by his departed father. He cleverly lays a trap for his uncle to find out, meantime feigning madness to keep the villain guessing. Once he realises the truth, he passes up the opportunity to kill the uncle at prayer as it was believed that was a ticket to hell, and in the end only manages to exact revenge at the cost of the kingdom to the Swedes, his own life, the lives of his betrothed Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, the pompous Polonius.
What presses on Hamlet all this time are circumstances beyond his control. He is not helpless, but he cannot manage what comes at him.
This is a very contemporary dilemma. The so-called 12-step programmes used to recover today by sufferers of complaints ranging from alcoholism and drug addiction to food issues and more begin by sufferers saying they had admitted powerlessness in the face of their addiction “and that our lives had become unmanageable”. That first step however only introduces a stark reality of “recovery” – at no point in the remaining 11 steps does life become “manageable”. Instead it is necessary to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”.
Life thus remains unmanageable by the sufferer alone. As Catholic theologian Richard Rohr emphasises, life is only managed through turning to a force greater than oneself, a “higher power”. When I jest with my friends that my tiny bubble of the universe is “completely unmanageable” my tongue is firmly in my cheek but. . .
Seen coldly, life – life, not one’s daily chores – is ultimately unmanageable for everyone. However much we might think we are taking care of everything, the reality is that everything is actually taking care of us. Whatever we think we are doing, in the end, we end. As Celine’s most famous aphorism put it, “The truth of this life is death”.* Celine endlessly mocked the perverse delusions of madly avoiding confronting the truth about our lives and ourselves.
Hamlet, something of a genius, nimble as nimble could be, is nonetheless overwhelmed by a chain of challenges that finally destroys him. As he avoids one calamity after another, he dismisses as foolishness the looming presence of the cunning son of the Swedish king, who uses an excuse to entrap and ultimately subjugate the Danes. Honoring the fallen prince fits in perfectly with the Swede’s perfidious plan.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that he cannot bring himself to act, but that he feels unable to act – trapped in a web of circumstance that try as he might, he cannot shake loose. The famous “To be or not be” speech is a meditation in the face of this harsh reality of trying to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and end them at the price of losing his life, or surviving but enduring that sea. Hamlet wants to live, and he wants to exact revenge, but his own cunning plan comes to nothing though he manages to kill his uncle in the mist of a general slaughter.
Hamlet is a brilliantly constructed play and is full of wonderful lines that have kept their magic for more than 400 years now. Many of these are mysterious**, still the subject of conjecture, while others resonate within us for their wisdom. A good production shows that life really is unmanageable – by us. The Great Dane barks up the wrong tree by trying to handle it all himself.
Of course, it is pretty wordy. ..and full of cliches.
Thanks for reading.
*Celine used this famous phrase first in his doctoral thesis on the physician Semmelweis, who discovered the principles of antisepsis at the cost of his own life. Celine then plagiarised himself in this first novel, Journey to the end of night.
** “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
It will be a wonderful occasion – after all those years, and the countless words spilt on innumerable pages, real and surreal, he remains the greatest writer ever, and that is saying a lot. Not everything he wrote had the golden touch of his best but in a relatively short life, he produced so much outstanding literature it is difficult to credit, though it is true.
It is also true that there is a lot that is unknown about Shakespeare. That has allowed people who should know better to create fabulous alternative authors, from Bacon to other nobles otherwise unheard of. Not too long ago the film Anonymous put just such a case. Trying to be as generous of spirit as possible, that is complete rubbish.
Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with others, but it did not take long for him to be regarded as the senior partner in that kind of enterprise. He had a gift that was just astonishing, even to his peers. It is also true that theatrical practice at the time meant companies “woodshedded” their productions. Shakespeare as an actor as well as playwright would have taken a full part in these and no doubt there would have been changes to lines and scenes as a result. Plays were more of a collaborative enterprise then than they typically are today. That is a very far cry from a secret author cunningly slipping scripts to an otherwise undistinguished actor and entrepreneur.
Shakespeare’s work seems inexhaustibly multifaceted. A few of his plays have been portrayed as both comedies and tragedies, and I’ve written a blog post about this (“Toiling with Troilus”), but more nuanced interpretations of his work allows for remarkably wide-ranging productions. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet creda\ibly set the famous romance in modern Venice, California’s gang turf (to be fair, Bernstein’s West Side Story did the same on New York streets without crediting the Bard). Productions change their historical garb with remarkable ease, and make their cases to be understood and appreciated.
Even so, there are those who don’t like him.
Recently I had a brief conversation with a dramatist and actor who found him “too wordy”. Wow! It reminded me of the joke about someone who saw a production of Hamlet and was bored – “It’s full of cliches”.
An Irish critic titled a book on the plays Shakespeare is hard – but so is life. What was easy for readers and viewers to comprehend in Shakespeare’s lifetime now needs guidance to fully appreciate. But to suggest he is boring is just wrong. Part of the reason for the bard’s success was that he did it all – actor, theatre impresario, writer – so knew how to put “bums on seats” in competition with other attractions seeking punters’ pennies – bear-baiting for example. The groundlings – illterate kids and the like – needed excitement and Shakespeare gave it to them. The literate wanted more, and they got it too. But for us, changes in our spoken and written language and in theatre convention really mean using critical editions, and then our brains, to get what is there to be got.
There really is a very great deal. In “Toiling with Troilus” I’ve tried to show my appreciation of Troilus and Cressida, a play even many educated people have never heard of. This time I’d like to wander around Hamlet, arguably the world’s best-known dramatic work, and in its “existentialist” cloth, as fresh and relevant as when actors first trod the boards reciting the lines.
Discovering the “real” Hamlet is a detective story and no single explanation or text is ever likely to please everyone. Harold Jenkins’ wonderful Arden edition is my favourite and persuasively suggests that one printed edition, from Germany, was actually an inaccurate theft – a so-called memorial reconstruction – by one of the actors who appeared in the first production of the play. Jenkins even shows the role played by the actor who was the thief, as the man remembered the lines of the play closest to his own, and flubbed those where he was not involved. There is more in Jenkins’ absorbing account.
It is a commonplace to say that Hamlet the character was indecisive. That is not entirely fair. Hamlet was caught in a difficult situation. His father the king had died suddenly and he, the inheriting son, was deprived of the crown by his uncle, who had married his mother with unseemly haste after his father’s death. Brooding on this, he is confronted by the ghost of his father who says he’s been murdered, and insists on revenge.
Rationalist that he is, Hamlet needs to decide whether this vision is real or not, and if real, whether it might be a trick by a demon rather than a true visitation by his departed father. He cleverly lays a trap for his uncle to find out, meantime feigning madness to keep the villain guessing. Once he realises the truth, he passes up the opportunity to kill the uncle at prayer as it was believed that was a ticket to hell, and in the end only manages to exact revenge at the cost of the kingdom to the Swedes, his own life, the lives of his betrothed Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, the pompous Polonius.
What presses on Hamlet all this time are circumstances beyond his control. He is not helpless, but he cannot manage what comes at him.
This is a very contemporary dilemma. The so-called 12-step programmes used to recover today by sufferers of complaints ranging from alcoholism and drug addiction to food issues and more begin by sufferers saying they had admitted powerlessness in the face of their addiction “and that our lives had become unmanageable”. That first step however only introduces a stark reality of “recovery” – at no point in the remaining 11 steps does life become “manageable”. Instead it is necessary to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”.
Life thus remains unmanageable by the sufferer alone. As Catholic theologian Richard Rohr emphasises, life is only managed through turning to a force greater than oneself, a “higher power”. When I jest with my friends that my tiny bubble of the universe is “completely unmanageable” my tongue is firmly in my cheek but. . .
Seen coldly, life – life, not one’s daily chores – is ultimately unmanageable for everyone. However much we might think we are taking care of everything, the reality is that everything is actually taking care of us. Whatever we think we are doing, in the end, we end. As Celine’s most famous aphorism put it, “The truth of this life is death”.* Celine endlessly mocked the perverse delusions of madly avoiding confronting the truth about our lives and ourselves.
Hamlet, something of a genius, nimble as nimble could be, is nonetheless overwhelmed by a chain of challenges that finally destroys him. As he avoids one calamity after another, he dismisses as foolishness the looming presence of the cunning son of the Swedish king, who uses an excuse to entrap and ultimately subjugate the Danes. Honoring the fallen prince fits in perfectly with the Swede’s perfidious plan.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that he cannot bring himself to act, but that he feels unable to act – trapped in a web of circumstance that try as he might, he cannot shake loose. The famous “To be or not be” speech is a meditation in the face of this harsh reality of trying to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and end them at the price of losing his life, or surviving but enduring that sea. Hamlet wants to live, and he wants to exact revenge, but his own cunning plan comes to nothing though he manages to kill his uncle in the mist of a general slaughter.
Hamlet is a brilliantly constructed play and is full of wonderful lines that have kept their magic for more than 400 years now. Many of these are mysterious**, still the subject of conjecture, while others resonate within us for their wisdom. A good production shows that life really is unmanageable – by us. The Great Dane barks up the wrong tree by trying to handle it all himself.
Of course, it is pretty wordy. ..and full of cliches.
Thanks for reading.
*Celine used this famous phrase first in his doctoral thesis on the physician Semmelweis, who discovered the principles of antisepsis at the cost of his own life. Celine then plagiarised himself in this first novel, Journey to the end of night.
** “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
October 31, 2015
Getting on with it
Henning Mankell died recently. He was 67. Mankell wrote dozens of novels. plays, and television and film scripts and has a non-fiction book yet to come on the illness that took him away. He was not only an author, but from what I can tell, a very nice person. Take it from me – writers are not always nice people.
Mankell’s best-known creation was a detective in the small Swedish city of Ystad, Kurt Wallander. Wallander made the switch from novel to television not only in Sweden but also in Britain where the title character was portrayed by Kenneth Branagh.
The Swedish series made it for me, someone who loves film but usually finds television unbearable. Wallander was not just human and fallible, he was declining in his powers of detection and the empathy, that he had used so brilliantly in his long career. His dedication to his profession destroyed his marriage and his daughter, coming to work with him, was not always charitable about his failings.
To this wannabe novelist with eight thrillers on offer in the e-universe, Mankell is both an embarrassment and a prompt. To have written so much and to have died relatively early – my slight (and so far unsuccessful) output pales in contrast. It is true he started writing fiction much earlier than I did, but so? He had the gumption to do it, while your unworthy correspondent hid his sublime light under not one but at least two scruffy bushels.
Other people in my life have also provided me with Mankell’s prompt: Celine’s most famous remark was that “the truth of this life is death” and when this insight is combined with stark reality, it definitely does focus the mind. I have been fortunate not to have a use-by date yet, but friends and loved ones have done, and the example of Mankell says to get with it.
There has been a nip of the wringer for me recently – a detached retina in one eye that has kept me from writing much. It could have led to blindness in that eye and that was a great pause for me – but since the operation I have scarcely put e-pen to e-paper. Yes, I can wriggle out from under a bit – the garden needs serious attention and I need to do some other domestic chores that matter.
But what I mean to do is to write – write fiction. It’s what I meant to do when I was fifteen years old, and it’s I what I’ve tried to do for around 15 years now, and when I’ve been able I’ve put my head down and got stuck into it. The more one writes, the better the writing is likely to be.
My eye is not still not well. It is weird. Two little bubbles dance around in it as if they are happy cells that have just divided and would like me to notice. When I go out in the noonday sun, I realise that I am neither a mad dog nor an Englishman, but am dazzled by the spectacle and without shades can not make my way. It is getting better but as with some other aspects of my life, getting better can be a long, long process.
Henning Mankell’s prompt says even if it is not improving at all, it is time to move.
Thanks for reading.
Mankell’s best-known creation was a detective in the small Swedish city of Ystad, Kurt Wallander. Wallander made the switch from novel to television not only in Sweden but also in Britain where the title character was portrayed by Kenneth Branagh.
The Swedish series made it for me, someone who loves film but usually finds television unbearable. Wallander was not just human and fallible, he was declining in his powers of detection and the empathy, that he had used so brilliantly in his long career. His dedication to his profession destroyed his marriage and his daughter, coming to work with him, was not always charitable about his failings.
To this wannabe novelist with eight thrillers on offer in the e-universe, Mankell is both an embarrassment and a prompt. To have written so much and to have died relatively early – my slight (and so far unsuccessful) output pales in contrast. It is true he started writing fiction much earlier than I did, but so? He had the gumption to do it, while your unworthy correspondent hid his sublime light under not one but at least two scruffy bushels.
Other people in my life have also provided me with Mankell’s prompt: Celine’s most famous remark was that “the truth of this life is death” and when this insight is combined with stark reality, it definitely does focus the mind. I have been fortunate not to have a use-by date yet, but friends and loved ones have done, and the example of Mankell says to get with it.
There has been a nip of the wringer for me recently – a detached retina in one eye that has kept me from writing much. It could have led to blindness in that eye and that was a great pause for me – but since the operation I have scarcely put e-pen to e-paper. Yes, I can wriggle out from under a bit – the garden needs serious attention and I need to do some other domestic chores that matter.
But what I mean to do is to write – write fiction. It’s what I meant to do when I was fifteen years old, and it’s I what I’ve tried to do for around 15 years now, and when I’ve been able I’ve put my head down and got stuck into it. The more one writes, the better the writing is likely to be.
My eye is not still not well. It is weird. Two little bubbles dance around in it as if they are happy cells that have just divided and would like me to notice. When I go out in the noonday sun, I realise that I am neither a mad dog nor an Englishman, but am dazzled by the spectacle and without shades can not make my way. It is getting better but as with some other aspects of my life, getting better can be a long, long process.
Henning Mankell’s prompt says even if it is not improving at all, it is time to move.
Thanks for reading.
May 24, 2015
Keep rollin', rollin', rollin'...
Yes, dear reader, it is the Frankie Laine theme tune of the TV series, Rawhide, that gave Clint Eastwood the start to his career as an icon. The rawhide in this case is going to be my posterior and the "dogie" a bicycle as I head out on the broad prairies of Germany, the Czech Republic and elsewhere in search of adventure and...and...locations for what I hope to write in the future. That means inter alia that I may not be even so infrequent a contributor to this blog as I have been. But so long as I manage to follow Monty Python's advice on how to live forever*, I'll be back.
Thanks for reading.
*From the endpapers of Monty's Big Red Paperbok (which was blue): "Keep breathing". This guide to life also cited the instructive How to spell by The Quoon.
Thanks for reading.
*From the endpapers of Monty's Big Red Paperbok (which was blue): "Keep breathing". This guide to life also cited the instructive How to spell by The Quoon.
The Idiot 2: Convincing lies
Dostoevsky had his own way of doing things. No writer before or since has really followed his method, insofar as he had one. Other writers kept notebooks but it is hard to imagine anyone today at least filling hundreds if not thousands of very messy pages before getting down to business.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
The Idiot 1: Lost and found in translation
The mirror to ourselves that is Dostoevsky’s great novel The Idiot was held up by me to me recently. It had been a long time since I’d read it and I’d thrown it onto my e-reader casually some time before. An eye operation sent me to the device as I could read larger type and I scrolled through the many offerings and hit on it. Why not?
Like so much with Dostoevsky, there is a challenge to any writer in reading him, and for English-language writers that starts with the translation. Russian is a strange language for those not familiar with Cyrillic alphabets, and even for those who are, it has problems not found even with German, a language with some characteristics similar to Russian.
Perhaps this is the reason why there have been so many translations of Dostoevsky’s works. No one is ever quite satisfied. There are no less than ten of The Idiot.
There is more to it now, courtesy of a Yank and his Russian wife, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. P & V, as they are often termed, seemed to have ushered in a new era of fine translations if you believe their press and some of the laudatory features and reviews written about them.
As someone far from fluent in Russian, I can hardly comment on the adequacy or lack of it of P & V from a translator’s perspective. One comment on the net suggests that the best thing to do with any book in translation where more than version is available is to dip into all of them, and take the one that “feels” the best. This is good advice.
P & V don’t get such an easy out. Gary Saul Morson ripped into them in a famous article in Commentary. Morson, who translated Dostoevsky’s magazine Writer’s Notebook in a judicious and scrupulous edition, said he was approached by professional writers seeking guidance about the pair’s work, as they found Dostoevsky and other Russians as rendered by them puzzling: how could a great writer be so unreadable? Morson took the translators to task for their method, which amounts to a literal translation by V then rendered into “better” English by her husband, who is not by any stretch a fluent Russian speaker. Their method has been praised in the past, but even before Morson’s critique it seemed to me on reading their claims to superiority because of their working method to be on the contrary a recipe for disaster.
My unease was confirmed for me while researching my novel The Russian Idea, I read background material that included excerpts from The Adolescent, earlier published as A Raw Youth translated by the author of a book of criticism. The only complete edition I could find was P & V’s. The extracts had made me keen to read it; P & V’s translation made me keen to finish it, as if Dostoevsky did not write it – they did.
This partly comes to mind now because the translation of The Idiot I have just read is by someone who seems never to figure in these translation wars, Eva Martin (1883-1940). Online research suggests this is the only translation she did. What information I’ve been able to get about her is that she was born in India to British parents and brought up in England. Her translation was published in 1915, when she was 32.
Eva Martin’s translation is available online free as it is out of copyright, and is cheap in print, so it is both ubiquitous and “e-ubiquitous”. It would be nice to know something about her and to know what people like Morson think of her version.
As it is I can say is that I howled with laughter at much of this book. People think Dostoevsky is a pessimist, and depressing, but this view is a travesty of a very complex mind, and there is no question that he is among the funniest writers ever. One particular section is an extended farce that had me holding my sides and gasping for breath.
There is a lot more to be said about this amazing novel, so I’ll put it in a further post.
Thanks for reading this one.
Like so much with Dostoevsky, there is a challenge to any writer in reading him, and for English-language writers that starts with the translation. Russian is a strange language for those not familiar with Cyrillic alphabets, and even for those who are, it has problems not found even with German, a language with some characteristics similar to Russian.
Perhaps this is the reason why there have been so many translations of Dostoevsky’s works. No one is ever quite satisfied. There are no less than ten of The Idiot.
There is more to it now, courtesy of a Yank and his Russian wife, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. P & V, as they are often termed, seemed to have ushered in a new era of fine translations if you believe their press and some of the laudatory features and reviews written about them.
As someone far from fluent in Russian, I can hardly comment on the adequacy or lack of it of P & V from a translator’s perspective. One comment on the net suggests that the best thing to do with any book in translation where more than version is available is to dip into all of them, and take the one that “feels” the best. This is good advice.
P & V don’t get such an easy out. Gary Saul Morson ripped into them in a famous article in Commentary. Morson, who translated Dostoevsky’s magazine Writer’s Notebook in a judicious and scrupulous edition, said he was approached by professional writers seeking guidance about the pair’s work, as they found Dostoevsky and other Russians as rendered by them puzzling: how could a great writer be so unreadable? Morson took the translators to task for their method, which amounts to a literal translation by V then rendered into “better” English by her husband, who is not by any stretch a fluent Russian speaker. Their method has been praised in the past, but even before Morson’s critique it seemed to me on reading their claims to superiority because of their working method to be on the contrary a recipe for disaster.
My unease was confirmed for me while researching my novel The Russian Idea, I read background material that included excerpts from The Adolescent, earlier published as A Raw Youth translated by the author of a book of criticism. The only complete edition I could find was P & V’s. The extracts had made me keen to read it; P & V’s translation made me keen to finish it, as if Dostoevsky did not write it – they did.
This partly comes to mind now because the translation of The Idiot I have just read is by someone who seems never to figure in these translation wars, Eva Martin (1883-1940). Online research suggests this is the only translation she did. What information I’ve been able to get about her is that she was born in India to British parents and brought up in England. Her translation was published in 1915, when she was 32.
Eva Martin’s translation is available online free as it is out of copyright, and is cheap in print, so it is both ubiquitous and “e-ubiquitous”. It would be nice to know something about her and to know what people like Morson think of her version.
As it is I can say is that I howled with laughter at much of this book. People think Dostoevsky is a pessimist, and depressing, but this view is a travesty of a very complex mind, and there is no question that he is among the funniest writers ever. One particular section is an extended farce that had me holding my sides and gasping for breath.
There is a lot more to be said about this amazing novel, so I’ll put it in a further post.
Thanks for reading this one.
April 28, 2015
Agatha's agony
My e-reader came with 100 books, mostly classics out of copyright. It was a surprise to see one of Agatha Christie’s novels included and after an operation on my eye, when I wanted something light I could read in quite large type, I decided to check out The Secret Adversary.
It is terrible – not the worst book I have ever read, but thrusting strong at the finish line. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the owners of Dame Agatha’s rights just didn’t bother to hang on to this lamentable effort, or sold it very cheaply into a package.
The Secret Adversary was Christie’s second novel, after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was only published after she agreed to change the ending. Styles introduced the world to Hercule Poirot, an enduring character through television and films. The Secret Adversary featured “Tommy and Tuppence”, and is something like one would imagine an Enid Bylton adventure to be but very slightly more adult. Christie went on to write another five featuring this silly duo, while adding Jane Marple and others to her stable of detective heroes. In all she wrote 66 detective novels as well as short stories, romances under another pseudonym, and some enduring plays, The Mousetrap – still in production – and Witness for the Prosecution.
Her estate claims she is the third most published writer in history after Shakespeare and the Bible and one of her mysteries, And Then There Were None, has sold over 100 million copies. Another, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was just a few years back, voted by fellow Crime Writers as the greatest detective novel ever. In all, her works have sold 2 billion copies.
For me two of these stood out – Ackroyd, by common consent a pathbreaker, and Crooked House, one of Christie’s own favourites.
Christie’s genius – and it was genius – was to script very easy-reading puzzle stories. There is typically little if any attempt to be realistic in her novels; they attract for their intellectual dimension of figuring out “whodunnit” before she, he or them is revealed. Secret Adversary has next to no description; it relies heavily on dialogue and action, and that is part of how she did it. It is a kind of trick and a good one, and I have learned from it in my own writing. Once a reader understands it, “whodunnit” is typically not hard to decipher. The “secret adversary” was obvious from first appearance to me, though reviewers at the time were fooled right to the end.
There is something else that pops up with this novel that casts a sly sidelight on Christie’s life. With Christie, art imitating life is never far away as she used the upper class milieu of her own life in her books. But four years after Secret Adversary, she reversed things in spectacular fashion.
One of the characters in Secret Adversary, a young American woman, feigns amnesia for years to deceive kidnappers who want her to reveal the whereabouts of a dangerous document that could – yes – end life as we know it by ushering in “Bolshevist” rule in Britain. The character has a background story not entirely unlike Christie’s own.
When her husband asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926*, amnesia seems to have appealed to her. Col Christie, for it was he, took off to spend a dirty weekend with his new love, and Agatha disappeared after leaving a note to say she was heading for Yorkshire. Her car was found near a lake but she was nowhere to be seen. A hue and cry that involved a thousand police and 15,000 volunteer searchers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Home Secretary was played out through the media until she was turned up in a Yorkshire hotel under another name – why, the surname name of her husband’s new lover! Two doctors confirmed she was suffering from amnesia.
Agatha Christie never said. When she wrote her autobiography, she did not even mention the drama. Attempts to make her disappearance a contrived publicity stunt have been met by the estate with unsuccessful lawsuits. The natural and more likely explanation (to me) is hat she wanted to embarrass her husband and was herself embarrassed by the publicity.
Still, it never hurt her career. Agatha later married an archaeologist named Mallowan, but kept her first married name for most of her fiction. The colonel and his new missus actually seem to have lived happily ever after.
For many people – certainly for me – Christie’s books lose their appeal with age. By my early 20s their lack of realism and their predictability palled enough that I stopped reading her, along with others in the genre she so successfully dominated – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Detective stories still flourish by using more realistic characters while not abandoning the puzzle element she made her own. It is perhaps ironic that Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, appeared in 1929, three years after her acknowledged masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Raymond Chandler, in his famous essay “The simple art of murder”, showed how Hammett undermined the Christie style puzzle story, giving murders “back to people who commit them for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”.
Hammett had advantages Christie did not. He had been a detective, a real one, so had to hand a cast of characters based on real people and he had a school of writing, so called “objectivism” to employ that suited the genre. Like Christie he was phenomenally successful, but ran out of steam after five novels in five years and afterwards had other things to worry about.
Modern detective masters have split into a range of sub-genres: “police procedurals” which rely on the detail of crime investigation, which can include forensics, almost a sub-genre on their own, adventure, psychological thrillers, and more. Yet Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple have ploughed on through the decades especially in television and film. British actor David Suchet not too long ago retired as the Belgian detective after a mere quarter century reprising the role. The Dame endures, if The Secret Adversary does not.
* The other woman and the colonel met while travelling the world promoting the “British and Empire Exhibition” to be held in London in 1924-25. Agatha and she were on a committee designing a children’s feature for the exhibition. On this trip Agatha and her husband were introduced to surfing, and claimed to have been among the first Europeans to stand up on a surfboard when visiting Hawaii. Sadly, Agatha never made this a feature in her novels or stories; she missed a trick there!
It is terrible – not the worst book I have ever read, but thrusting strong at the finish line. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the owners of Dame Agatha’s rights just didn’t bother to hang on to this lamentable effort, or sold it very cheaply into a package.
The Secret Adversary was Christie’s second novel, after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was only published after she agreed to change the ending. Styles introduced the world to Hercule Poirot, an enduring character through television and films. The Secret Adversary featured “Tommy and Tuppence”, and is something like one would imagine an Enid Bylton adventure to be but very slightly more adult. Christie went on to write another five featuring this silly duo, while adding Jane Marple and others to her stable of detective heroes. In all she wrote 66 detective novels as well as short stories, romances under another pseudonym, and some enduring plays, The Mousetrap – still in production – and Witness for the Prosecution.
Her estate claims she is the third most published writer in history after Shakespeare and the Bible and one of her mysteries, And Then There Were None, has sold over 100 million copies. Another, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was just a few years back, voted by fellow Crime Writers as the greatest detective novel ever. In all, her works have sold 2 billion copies.
For me two of these stood out – Ackroyd, by common consent a pathbreaker, and Crooked House, one of Christie’s own favourites.
Christie’s genius – and it was genius – was to script very easy-reading puzzle stories. There is typically little if any attempt to be realistic in her novels; they attract for their intellectual dimension of figuring out “whodunnit” before she, he or them is revealed. Secret Adversary has next to no description; it relies heavily on dialogue and action, and that is part of how she did it. It is a kind of trick and a good one, and I have learned from it in my own writing. Once a reader understands it, “whodunnit” is typically not hard to decipher. The “secret adversary” was obvious from first appearance to me, though reviewers at the time were fooled right to the end.
There is something else that pops up with this novel that casts a sly sidelight on Christie’s life. With Christie, art imitating life is never far away as she used the upper class milieu of her own life in her books. But four years after Secret Adversary, she reversed things in spectacular fashion.
One of the characters in Secret Adversary, a young American woman, feigns amnesia for years to deceive kidnappers who want her to reveal the whereabouts of a dangerous document that could – yes – end life as we know it by ushering in “Bolshevist” rule in Britain. The character has a background story not entirely unlike Christie’s own.
When her husband asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926*, amnesia seems to have appealed to her. Col Christie, for it was he, took off to spend a dirty weekend with his new love, and Agatha disappeared after leaving a note to say she was heading for Yorkshire. Her car was found near a lake but she was nowhere to be seen. A hue and cry that involved a thousand police and 15,000 volunteer searchers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Home Secretary was played out through the media until she was turned up in a Yorkshire hotel under another name – why, the surname name of her husband’s new lover! Two doctors confirmed she was suffering from amnesia.
Agatha Christie never said. When she wrote her autobiography, she did not even mention the drama. Attempts to make her disappearance a contrived publicity stunt have been met by the estate with unsuccessful lawsuits. The natural and more likely explanation (to me) is hat she wanted to embarrass her husband and was herself embarrassed by the publicity.
Still, it never hurt her career. Agatha later married an archaeologist named Mallowan, but kept her first married name for most of her fiction. The colonel and his new missus actually seem to have lived happily ever after.
For many people – certainly for me – Christie’s books lose their appeal with age. By my early 20s their lack of realism and their predictability palled enough that I stopped reading her, along with others in the genre she so successfully dominated – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Detective stories still flourish by using more realistic characters while not abandoning the puzzle element she made her own. It is perhaps ironic that Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, appeared in 1929, three years after her acknowledged masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Raymond Chandler, in his famous essay “The simple art of murder”, showed how Hammett undermined the Christie style puzzle story, giving murders “back to people who commit them for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”.
Hammett had advantages Christie did not. He had been a detective, a real one, so had to hand a cast of characters based on real people and he had a school of writing, so called “objectivism” to employ that suited the genre. Like Christie he was phenomenally successful, but ran out of steam after five novels in five years and afterwards had other things to worry about.
Modern detective masters have split into a range of sub-genres: “police procedurals” which rely on the detail of crime investigation, which can include forensics, almost a sub-genre on their own, adventure, psychological thrillers, and more. Yet Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple have ploughed on through the decades especially in television and film. British actor David Suchet not too long ago retired as the Belgian detective after a mere quarter century reprising the role. The Dame endures, if The Secret Adversary does not.
* The other woman and the colonel met while travelling the world promoting the “British and Empire Exhibition” to be held in London in 1924-25. Agatha and she were on a committee designing a children’s feature for the exhibition. On this trip Agatha and her husband were introduced to surfing, and claimed to have been among the first Europeans to stand up on a surfboard when visiting Hawaii. Sadly, Agatha never made this a feature in her novels or stories; she missed a trick there!
April 9, 2015
Truth that leads to eternal life!
When I was a lot younger I fobbed off a couple of young Korean women who kept urging me to become a Jehovah’s Witness. They were nice, really decent people and I felt a bit guilty taking their Watchtower and Awake magazines and newspapers when I was 99 and 44/100ths per cent sure I was not going to be Jehovah’s Witness. Actually, I may have been well over 100 per cent and have had some fantasy of persuading them to atheism and beyond. Whatever, they kept coming and it began to be difficult for them, and for me.
Eventually I hit on a wheeze – that I would take their special course, entitled “The truth that leads to eternal life” if they would promise that if I decided not to join they would leave me be.
It was a deal and the pair turned up every week and we discussed a chapter of the book the course was based on.
Over the few months this took, I gained a certain appreciation of this strange religion, a millennialist movement whose earnest practitioners are found just about everywhere on earth, door-knocking their message to anyone who will take the time to listen.
The JWs (said “Jaydubs” in New Zealand where I now live) have some surprising beliefs. For one, they don’t believe in Hell. Nor do they believe that when you die, you go to heaven – some do but the numbers are strictly limited to 144,000 and those places are pretty much full.*
The remainder of us, including all those who have lived before, are going to get tested by God at some stage, shown how to live the way God wants, and then – if we pass muster - granted eternal life right here on Earth. JW literature often features artwork depicting children petting lions and the like.
While we are waiting for this, JWs do believe in the devil, who God has given the opportunity to ruin the world, and who is doing a very good job of it – as indeed we all know. Eventually God will first banish this unworthy fellow to “a dark and dismal place” and after the final reckoning with we humans, will vaporise that tosser.
Because the devil is ruling the world that means JWs don’t take part in government, vote, or serve in the military, attitudes that have led to persecution and occasionally death in many countries, apparently on the grounds that while they themselves are harmless, their example is not. Quakers may nod in appreciation of this.**
I didn’t mind the absurd reasoning or the bizarre promise if the action – or lack of action – helped make this a better and more peaceful world.
Other things about the JWs were a bit tougher to take, in particular the idea that blood transfusions are wrong – to the point where parents refuse to allow their children to have them for life-saving operations. The rationale for this now escapes me though I can remember vividly the young woman who visited me speaking up for the appalling doctrine with verve and conviction.
The course ended, with it our meetings and after my visit to a JW “Kingdom Hall” one Sunday, our relationship. The Koreans stopped coming after a tearful farewell. They had been so hopeful…I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.
It is easy to mock JWs and in some respects, I guess they deserve it. No one asks them to come knocking and their views, to put it mildly, are certainly unusual. Their religion isn’t for me, but I’ll respect them all the same for their missionary zeal, their patience in the face of hostility and persecution, and for some of their tenets.
They are not alone in believing in eternal life on earth come Judgment Day. Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th century Russian theologian, not only thought that, but believed that science would enable all previously dead people to be revived. Fedorov, a librarian at what became the State Library in Moscow occupied much of his adult life on this singular idea, but did not think this a religious belief but a scientific certainty and obligation, though he was a keen Orthodox Christian. While immortality for those living was possible, Fedorov argued, it was immoral to achieve that without going back over the millennia and reviving those who had come before.***
Fedorov’s desire may have sprung out of his millennial (Orthodox) Christianity, but his claim and his aim was scientific – his God gave humans the ability to think, to create, to devise and expected them to do it, and he saw the ability to bring the dead back to life and to achieve immortality, as a scientific problem. Nowadays other people think that too.
The JWs are still around, of course, and poor Nikolai is not – he is waiting to return maybe, when he will be able to have lecture tours to tell us all how he told us so, way back when.
Nowadays the tendency is to invert this process and to leave God completely out of it. Science predicts the end, apparently. Jehovah’s Witnesses are presumably rubbing their hands in anxious anticipation as they read apocalyptic predictions of the horrors that await as our feckless species overheats the planet. It is in their Bible, somewhere…Those young Korean women told me in 1970 or so what it would be like – earthquakes, tidal waves, climate disasters…they dismissed as ignorant raving the idea that God would appear in the sky – nature would give the signs. They claimed not scientific but Biblical authority and in those days the scientific doomsayers weren’t on about global warming but ice ages, and some of them are the same people! They just want to be in a band, on a wagon, waving at the crowd…
This really is heading somewhere: the subject of my new book. It’s not spoiling things to say it may not mention the JWs or Nikolai Fedorov. But it’s definitely going to mention the end of the human race, which some people predict is scientifically certain to come along sometime probably in this century. We are finished. It’s too late to do anything about it.
And I”m going to write it up. There is a question to be asked here, about why I would bother…and why anyone would want to do anything but party on down from this moment onward…you’ll have to read the result to find that out, and it’s not written yet.
Thanks for getting through this one.
*The JWs have their own translation of the Bible which has been disputed in some respects but this comes from The Book of Revelations and the curious can find this number in any translation I’ve ever seen. It’s probably worth pointing out that there are some things in common between the JWs and Islam as well as other millennial religions, though the Koran (or Qu’ran) definitely has heaven and hell on offer or warning.
**A read of the autobiography of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, is revealing.
***Fedorov’s writings were not published until after his death in 1903 but manuscript copies were circulating and Dostoevsky – no mean Christian – admired him. Tolstoy was a friend until the librarian refused to see him because of ideological differences. Wikipedia is good on him, and so is Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea, a book I used partly for my novel of the same title.
Eventually I hit on a wheeze – that I would take their special course, entitled “The truth that leads to eternal life” if they would promise that if I decided not to join they would leave me be.
It was a deal and the pair turned up every week and we discussed a chapter of the book the course was based on.
Over the few months this took, I gained a certain appreciation of this strange religion, a millennialist movement whose earnest practitioners are found just about everywhere on earth, door-knocking their message to anyone who will take the time to listen.
The JWs (said “Jaydubs” in New Zealand where I now live) have some surprising beliefs. For one, they don’t believe in Hell. Nor do they believe that when you die, you go to heaven – some do but the numbers are strictly limited to 144,000 and those places are pretty much full.*
The remainder of us, including all those who have lived before, are going to get tested by God at some stage, shown how to live the way God wants, and then – if we pass muster - granted eternal life right here on Earth. JW literature often features artwork depicting children petting lions and the like.
While we are waiting for this, JWs do believe in the devil, who God has given the opportunity to ruin the world, and who is doing a very good job of it – as indeed we all know. Eventually God will first banish this unworthy fellow to “a dark and dismal place” and after the final reckoning with we humans, will vaporise that tosser.
Because the devil is ruling the world that means JWs don’t take part in government, vote, or serve in the military, attitudes that have led to persecution and occasionally death in many countries, apparently on the grounds that while they themselves are harmless, their example is not. Quakers may nod in appreciation of this.**
I didn’t mind the absurd reasoning or the bizarre promise if the action – or lack of action – helped make this a better and more peaceful world.
Other things about the JWs were a bit tougher to take, in particular the idea that blood transfusions are wrong – to the point where parents refuse to allow their children to have them for life-saving operations. The rationale for this now escapes me though I can remember vividly the young woman who visited me speaking up for the appalling doctrine with verve and conviction.
The course ended, with it our meetings and after my visit to a JW “Kingdom Hall” one Sunday, our relationship. The Koreans stopped coming after a tearful farewell. They had been so hopeful…I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.
It is easy to mock JWs and in some respects, I guess they deserve it. No one asks them to come knocking and their views, to put it mildly, are certainly unusual. Their religion isn’t for me, but I’ll respect them all the same for their missionary zeal, their patience in the face of hostility and persecution, and for some of their tenets.
They are not alone in believing in eternal life on earth come Judgment Day. Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th century Russian theologian, not only thought that, but believed that science would enable all previously dead people to be revived. Fedorov, a librarian at what became the State Library in Moscow occupied much of his adult life on this singular idea, but did not think this a religious belief but a scientific certainty and obligation, though he was a keen Orthodox Christian. While immortality for those living was possible, Fedorov argued, it was immoral to achieve that without going back over the millennia and reviving those who had come before.***
Fedorov’s desire may have sprung out of his millennial (Orthodox) Christianity, but his claim and his aim was scientific – his God gave humans the ability to think, to create, to devise and expected them to do it, and he saw the ability to bring the dead back to life and to achieve immortality, as a scientific problem. Nowadays other people think that too.
The JWs are still around, of course, and poor Nikolai is not – he is waiting to return maybe, when he will be able to have lecture tours to tell us all how he told us so, way back when.
Nowadays the tendency is to invert this process and to leave God completely out of it. Science predicts the end, apparently. Jehovah’s Witnesses are presumably rubbing their hands in anxious anticipation as they read apocalyptic predictions of the horrors that await as our feckless species overheats the planet. It is in their Bible, somewhere…Those young Korean women told me in 1970 or so what it would be like – earthquakes, tidal waves, climate disasters…they dismissed as ignorant raving the idea that God would appear in the sky – nature would give the signs. They claimed not scientific but Biblical authority and in those days the scientific doomsayers weren’t on about global warming but ice ages, and some of them are the same people! They just want to be in a band, on a wagon, waving at the crowd…
This really is heading somewhere: the subject of my new book. It’s not spoiling things to say it may not mention the JWs or Nikolai Fedorov. But it’s definitely going to mention the end of the human race, which some people predict is scientifically certain to come along sometime probably in this century. We are finished. It’s too late to do anything about it.
And I”m going to write it up. There is a question to be asked here, about why I would bother…and why anyone would want to do anything but party on down from this moment onward…you’ll have to read the result to find that out, and it’s not written yet.
Thanks for getting through this one.
*The JWs have their own translation of the Bible which has been disputed in some respects but this comes from The Book of Revelations and the curious can find this number in any translation I’ve ever seen. It’s probably worth pointing out that there are some things in common between the JWs and Islam as well as other millennial religions, though the Koran (or Qu’ran) definitely has heaven and hell on offer or warning.
**A read of the autobiography of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, is revealing.
***Fedorov’s writings were not published until after his death in 1903 but manuscript copies were circulating and Dostoevsky – no mean Christian – admired him. Tolstoy was a friend until the librarian refused to see him because of ideological differences. Wikipedia is good on him, and so is Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea, a book I used partly for my novel of the same title.
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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