Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 7

Digression digression

Since starting this blog my aim has been to write at least one post a week, and lately I’ve been failing conspicuously to do that. Blagh! Life outside the blogosphere has just got pretty full on for one thing, and also I’ve been thinking about things, maybe rather too much. Still, I have a plan so I thought I’d try to put a bit more of it into action with a new post, though it is only a teaser for something to come.

My next to last post was intended to be a sort of introduction to a Shakespeare play most people have never heard of, Troilus and Cressida, a play that will have a walk-on part in the book I am writing now, Kaos. Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”, and perhaps the most problematic of them all. Anyone wishing to get right into this will find David Bevington’s Arden edition a lot of fun.

I have seen this play three times: once at Stratford in the mid-1980s in a version set in the Crimean War, once in Edinburgh early in this century in a version that might be described as traditional, using a Renaissance staging, and in Glasgow not long after in a wild and exciting version of gender transference with the usual male roles played by women and vice versa. Each of these had its attractions, but for me none was ultimately successful.

That is not really surprising. In order to stage a play one must know what it’s about, and it is hard to say for sure what this play – which Bevington argues was “experimental” for Shakespeare – is about. There is a great deal of conflicting possibility contained within it: Its most famous lines, spoken by Odysseus to Achilles, have been argued about for several hundred years.

But that is mere detail from my perspective. The real troubles with this play are more profound, and stretch right back to its first publication as a quarto and the folio that followed fourteen years later.

There were three versions of this: two quartos and the version in the folio. The quarto versions are identical, apart from what might ordinarily appear to be extraneous introductory material. In this case a great range of problems flows from this packaging. One of the quartos says on the title page that the play had been performed by Shakespeare’s company, but the second quarto – identical in every other respect – says that it has never been performed.

That’s not all. This second version has a strange introduction to the reader that goes on to say that there are plenty of laughs in it: that Troilus and Cressida is a comedy right up there with the best of Terence and Plautus, Roman comic authors. Given that the play is set in the Trojan War and that it involves the death of the Trojan hero Hector, this at first sight seems a stretch. And even at second sight: a central character, Achilles’ fool Thersites, is arguably one of the most bitter characters in all literature, while Pandarus, whose name is the origin of one of the words for pimp, delivers a parting shot to the audience groaning with pustules of invective. Pandarus’ farewell to the audience has been taken to suggest that Shakespeare was suffering from syphilis, and this may be true. But readers who persist with me will see a different colouring altogether to Pandarus’ performance.

Then there is the folio, where the play is an apparently late addition, sandwiched in between the history plays and the tragedies. The folio also arranges the play differently.

So when some one asks the apparently simple question, “what is this play about?”, the answer is not necessarily straightforward.

My aim is to provide a reading of Troilus and Cressida different from the others I have encountered, including Bevington’s. I would not presume to suggest that my reading will exhaust the possibilities of the play. Lots of people have had a slash at interpreting Troilus and Cressida and my version is just as likely to be full of problems and errors as any other. What I want to do is to try to follow the claim in the quarto that it is indeed a comedy, that it is possible for a production to have the audience rolling in the aisles even as Hector is unceremoniously dealt to by Achilles’ helpmates. For to my mind, this is a play about what it means to be a human being, and within that, the poor quality of the male of our species, who regards himself as the lynchpin of society when he is more the cause of all the trouble. Shakespeare is sticking it up the idea of male superiority, skewering any kind of view of chivalry as he does it. If it hurts, well, so it should seems to be the message.

To laugh at these notions, to adopt a realistic view of men whose claims to superiority over woman rest simply and fully on physical strength, catered to an audience of emerging “bourgeoisie”, men with money who’d made their money, not had it handed down to them, men whose retinues were just as real, who could look, however implausibly, forward to a society based on merit. Their view of posterity was as unglamorous as their notions of the reality of the present.

About the time the quartos were published, Shakespeare’s sonnets were also released, and it is instructive to read one of the most of famous of these fourteen line marvels in this context, number 130:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts be dun;

If hairs be wires, why then black wires grow on her head;

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that in my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

Than any she belied with false compare.

To me this sonnet is about real love, about where it comes from and where it definitely does not. At a time when the cult of the not-long-dead Elizabeth I had seen quite ridiculous paeans to the chivalric notion of woman as perfect, as “goddess”, and of male behaviour in general, sonnet 130 stood up for real emotions in a real world and was a brave attack on the fantasy values of The Faerie Queen and any who promoted them.* The way I see Troilus and Cressida, this play is an even more ferocious attack in the same vein.

More to come! Thanks for reading.

*It is astonishing to me that the editor of the Arden edition of the sonnets, Katherine Duncan-Jones, says of this sonnet that “with utter cynicism, the speaker praises her as a ‘poor thing, but mine own’, celebrating her in swaggering terms which are ingeniously offensive both to her and to women in general”. Even taking into account “context” of the other sonnets in the sequence, it really doesn’t wash. Duncan-Jones is making this sonnet mean what she is determined for it to mean. The evidence is simply not there. And Shakespeare never wrote ‘a poor thing, but mine own’, which is a misquotation from As You Like It, by a poor man who has more kindly thoughts than Duncan-Jones allows him, and whose remark is partly a rueful reflection on his own character and suitability as a mate.

Apollonius! My good fellow!

My bedtime reading for a while now has been a biography of Apollonius of Tyana, an alleged near-contemporary of our alleged saviour. The biography was written by one Philostratus, who lived about a century after Apollonius was said to have lived, and who was commissioned to write it by his patron, the Roman Empress, Julia Domna, who killed herself before it was completed. Philostratus finished it anyway.

The biography is one of the amazing series of parallel texts of classical literature (that is, Greek and Latin, with the original on one page and the translation on the facing page) now going under the Loeb Classical Library rubric, and now published by Harvard University. It must surely be a labour of love to the people involved. All the greats are there - Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Euripides, and so on - along with a great swag of lesser known writers whose works would be unavailable otherwise. Included are the early "Christian fathers" as well as many pagan thinkers of the Christian era, including our dear Apollonius.

Apollonius was a Pythagorean, or so Philostratus says. Like Jesus, the evidence of his historical reality is slender, though there is some.

I bought this book - or rather trilogy* - in a real bookshop, and it was faintly pricey. At the time I was labouring under the delusion that Apollonius was someone else, and when I got the book home, and started reading it, I realised my mistake and put it aside. My aim had been to incorporate a view of the life of Jesus into a novel, but I at length decided that no one could do that without being labeled an imitator of Dan Brown due to the immense success of The Da Vinci Code, so dropped the plan though maybe some other time I'll find a way.

A year or so later I picked it up again, and was surprised to discover that Apollonius was famous to practically the entire planet, but not to me. I would mention to someone that I was reading this biography, and that person would say, "Oh, right - the one people think was the real Jesus," or, "The book people think was the first gospel," or, "the fellow people think was the competitor of Jesus"...or, finally, "yes, the first travelogue"...for so it very well may be: Apollonius, as well as a philosopher, was also a great tourist who traveled the known world more or less. Originally from Asia Minor, he was "Greek" in the cultural sense but went to India, returned, went to Spain, returned, went to Egypt and then Ethiopia...he knew people who became emperors, and was tried by an emperor (Domitian) who was the son of one of his earlier acquaintances who later became an emperor, and he had all kinds of interesting skills such as being able to see things that were happening quite far away, and foretell the future. He had some other skills I won't go into as that would spoil a friend's opportunities. One that won't is that he knew how to deal with satyrs. These wee beasties, which have legs like goats but human bodies, enjoy the pleasures of the female of our species almost as much as I do**, but they don't know how to treat them: first they ravish them, and then they eat them! Or I think that is what they do. Anyway, visiting a village where a satyr was hanging around shagging and then killing the women he admired, Apollonius knew how to handle the situation: get the dude drunk. Problem solved. Apollonius was a teetotaller, and waxed very eloquent on the poor quality of spirituality alcohol provides, but here was a use for the stuff that obviously saved the day.

Well! Back in Greco-Roman land, Apollonius thrust himself vigorously into politics, only in such a weird, sideways manner it's hard not to think the neighbours thought him just eccentric. But the author, Philostratus, certainly stands up for his approach, and compares him favourably even with Plato.***

What is all this about? In one way I found this book appalling rather than apollo-ing. Apollonius was reckoned to have written a biography of Pythagoras, and keeps talking about "philosophy" and its wonders throughout the hundreds of pages of this biography by Philostratus, but the reality is that there is precious little philosophising in it. Compared to say, Plato and Socrates, or the Stoic Epictetus, who was a contemporary, his philosophy is random, inconsequential, and even quite silly.

The biggest interest for me was Apollonius' belief that the philosophy of Pythagoras - known but sketchily to us today - came from India. I have seen other accounts of Greek philosophy in general claiming that for example Plato's ideas on reincarnation (shared apparently by Pythagoras) were no better than pale imitations of very sophisticated Indian doctrines. Apollonius went to India to get the real story, and while he may have, his encounter with the sages there is disappointingly skimpy.

There are some good moments, and there are times when Apollonius shows himself very intelligent and more. I have only now cracked the third and accompanying volume, of letters by the great man, and while they are for the most part very short, they do show that Apollonius knew the difference between Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Sophistry. He engaged in rivalry with a Stoic named Euphrates, blasting away at Euphrates for all manner of slipshod lifestyle "issues" (making pots of money, for one).

All the same, there is something unsettling in some one who openly declares himself "virtuous" in comparison to the rest of humanity - one would think that humility also is a virtue - in the same way that a non-Christian might find some of Jesus' remarks unsettling.

To compare the Jesus of the gospels to Apollonius, however, is both unfair and pointless. Christians have had several thousand years to mess around with the accounts of their hero, to improve him and make all his sayings consistent, and so on, and no one would think of doing this with Apollonius. When Christianity began to become a force in the philosophic/moral world, Apollonius was sometimes hoisted as an example of a non-Christian miracle worker to show that Jesus was nothing special, but that attempt was easily seen off (by Eusebius, for one). If, however, there were "Apollonians" beavering away concocting and revising and improving on Philostratus for a few millennia, there might be quite a different take on the man.

Those who suggest that Apollonius was indeed the "first Jesus", meanwhile, might be right, but the revising and improving would have had to be amazingly dramatic for this to be true.

For anyone interested in the philosophy of this era, this is not the book. Epictetus, the great Stoic, IS the book say I, particularly in the translation by "Mrs (Elizabeth) Carter", a contemporary of Samuel Johnson.****

For someone so ignorant as I, it was a revelation to encounter Apollonius' expertise in libanomancy - the art of divination using incense. This explanation is from the website Mermade Magickal Arts: "Signs are read in the flares, pops and crackling sounds as the incense burns upon the coals and also the shapes formed in the the rising smoke. Incense containing small seeds (corriander, jesamine, fennel, hemp) or vesta powder (salt peter) works well when asking a question of the oracle censer. As you ask your question aloud, listen for the answer in the popping of the seeds or the flashing of the powder. For example , one sign for “yes,” two in quick secession for “no”, silence for “the outcome is unclear”. Signs can be read by scrying in the smoke, watching its direction. If drifts toward you it is a positive omen."

Now you know.

* Two books of the trilogy are Philostratus' Life. The third is letters and other documents alleged to be by Apollonius, and other writings about him, including Eusebius' attack on any attempt to give him exalted status.

** That is to say, rather a lot.

*** Plato was a real politician and advised "rulers" in particular in Sicily. Plato was a great philosopher in many respects but politically he was very conservative, an enemy of democracy. Karl Popper demolished his reputation in The Open Society and Its Enemies, and though some have tried to restore it, it is fair to say it is gone forever.

****Anyone who really wants to get into this needs to read Epictetus, and beyond that, to read Plutarch's Moralia and Diogenes Laertius' history of philosophy, which runs from the earliest Greeks like Pythagoras through Epicurus. All these wild-eyed ancients - and many more - may be encountered in the Loeb series, available at any good-sized public library.

...but I digress...part one!

Those who read this blog regularly will know that Shakespeare is to me the greatest of all writers, and while I count myself lucky to be a native speaker of the language he used – though it is much changed since his day, for sure – I know that many people who speak other languages were also mesmerised by the bard, presumably in translation. Giuseppe Verdi, for example, wrote three operas based on the plays: Otello, Macbeth and Falstaff, and was working on a version of Merry Wives of Windsor when he was commissioned to write Rigoletto. The plays and film versions have been produced in every European language and more…Macbeth for example was used by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa for his Throne of Blood starring Toshiro Mifune.

Of course practically everyone knows Shakespeare at least as a name, but it is surprising how few of the people I know – people I respect and admire – are really familiar with even his most famous works. Irish critic Fintan O’Toole puts this down to the truth that you actually have to work at Shakespeare, and wrote a book called Shakespeare is hard, but so is life. Really getting into the plays and poems to the point where they become fascinating needs some application, and it is not at all fair to blame people whose lives are full to bursting for not wishing to apply it.

Still it would be great for them, I reckon, if they would…In a few years on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of his death, the world will be awash with new productions, including no doubt a BBC reworking of all the plays There will be new films, symposia and lectures and books-a-go-go groaning with photos, maps, etchings, line drawings, abstract squiggles by chimps, the rehashes of the known facts and heaps and heaps of speculation. Shakespeare’s sexuality will get a proper thrashing…Maybe all that secondary fru-fru will set people onto it, onto him. For Shakespeare for our time, once encountered by an inquiring mind goes beyond a mere man, past even a great writer. He is an adventurous journey once begun lasts a lifetime.

Let me show how this can work. Anyone who wants can get a copy of Hamlet in the Arden edition edited by Harold Jenkins. This is not the most recent edition in this excellent series, but it serves very well to illustrate my point and was termed in a rival edition “magisterial”, so I am not alone in suggesting it is worthwhile.

Jenkins’ introduction spans about 160 pages, and is as much a detective story as anything Agatha Christie ever wrote. There were three versions of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s lifetime and immediately after – two “quarto” standalone editions and the version in the first folio of the collected plays. Not only is there the question of which text is the better one, there is also the problem of “collation” – the compositors of the time all made mistakes, misreading words, mis-spelling them, leaving them out. Jenkins shows pretty conclusively that one of the quartos was actually a pirate edition “memorially reconstructed” by someone who acted in it.* And going beyond that to the wider questions of what this play is about, why it was written the way it was, and when, what the sources were for the writer, what allusions classical (“pagan”) and Biblical, what the arguments are between the experts about these things.

Then, as if that is not enough, Jenkins gives his take on the great passages, the characters and more in a series of longer notes at the back taking up some 150 or so pages.

And in the text itself, word choices and meanings and other problematical textual issues are dealt with on the page where they occur.

So this is not merely a play that one can get on DVD, or go to a theatre and see, expecting to gain full measure. Suddenly Shakespeare becomes as a lover, once only an acquaintance, clothed and hidden in so many ways, now revealed by love naked beside you…beautiful, challenging, tempting, inspiring, open to you to engage and explore and enjoy, if you are lucky, for as long you both draw breath.

And Hamlet, though Shakespeare’s best known and longest play, is but one enticing feature of this endlessly beautiful and fascinating corpus. Each not only pays studying, and reading and enjoyment in performance (and if one is lucky enough, enjoyment as part of a performance), but repays all these…and the further in you go, the deeper you want to go. At least with the great works – not all of Shakespeare’s plays were great – fresh attendance to the marvel reveals new ways of seeing…

…and those “ways of seeing” are what makes Shakespeare the genius he was/is. Beautiful words, terrific expressions, fantastic stories, and the rest would be meaningless if they were but sweetish froth on the surface of our lives. The bard penetrated deeply into what it means to be alive. He doesn’t grow old; he is constantly renewed in our minds, hearts and spirits.

More to come. There always is…

* So great has been the fascination with Shakespeare that the compositors of the first folio are known by their work – how many there were and which bits each set in type – the role(s) this intellectual pirate took in the production has been doped out by which bits he got pretty well, and which were glosses.

A new game

After all the caterwauling about Kaos, the book I am presently writing, some light relief:

Some years ago, after writing the novel now called The Kleiber Monster, I decided that I had not really confronted some of the issues that were both implied and raised in that book, and wrote another, now called Tobi’s Game. Tobi’s Game had a similar structure to its predecessor, and covered much of the same ground, but was in all quite a different book. I liked it, as I liked (and like) Kleiber. But when a few years ago I decided to put most of my books up on the internet, I left Tobi out.

This week, after prompting from a friend and fellow writer, it has gone up on smashwords and amazon. You, dear reader, are invited to have a look at it – and Kleiber!. Oh all right, have a look at all of them! Sample them and then buy them!

Yes, I like them all, even when I know no one of them is the perfect novel I have in my sights to write. Nonetheless, they are – according to me – different from run of the mill genre novels and have something that not only sets them apart, but that makes each worth reading.

Of course I would say that.

Tobi’s Game was left out when I published the first four of the novels now available on the net because I didn’t think it met the criteria for publication, not because I think it is a bad book. I think it is a good book, and maybe my best book – except for the one I am writing now…

The path to publication for Tobi’s Game was far from straightforward. It only occurred to me that it might be publishable because of the success of 50 Shades of Grey, a book I have not read and have no intention of reading. I have checked out the synopsis, some analytical reviews and some interviews with the author and listened while friends have talked about reading it, and trying to read it*. There is a great deal of hostility to this book in the “indy author” world, and I think this is partly envy: that someone else has “gone viral” with what appears to be a trashy novel.

Well, my novels are trashy novels, and I would not mind at all if they went viral. Not only that, from what I’ve heard and read, 50 Shades has brought shall we say certain topics into the mainstream of social life, and discussion of these – not necessarily practice – can hardly be a bad thing. This book seems to have pushed out the boundaries a fair way, and that is what prompted me to seek an independent opinion of Tobi’s Game. That was positive, and as I write at least it’s out there. Whether it stays out there is another matter altogether. You may have to be in quick.

Though Tobi’s Game was written years before 50 Shades, in one sense it could be described as a response to it: another friend, who had given up on 50 Shades, said in effect that she did not want to read about rescuing “damaged” people by enduring their cruelty. Tobi’s Game involves a great deal of sex, much of it sadistic – but it does not excuse sadistic behaviour, is not titillating, and is meant to show that the behaviour and attitudes that underlie that behaviour can not be “repaired” by catering to them. Fantasy sex is one thing, but cruelty to some one who does not like it is another. Whether sadistic sex in this way is between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man, older or younger, is immaterial. It is wrong. These distinctions are at the heart of Tobi’s Game, though I hope readers will not think they exhaust the intellectual and moral interest of my book. There is more there.

Back to the future…thanks for reading.

* Only one of about half a dozen friends who have taken on Fifty Shades of Grey has finished it. The others have quit after the first of three parts.

Blast off!

Dear reader – if you are heartily sick of my unending witterings about the ins and outs of something I have not actually been doing, I really do not blame you, even a little bit. These thoughts of mine have been interesting to me, and truly, they have helped me clarify what I am doing, right and wrong, and in the recent past, where I have been going wrong. At least I think this is true. The touchstones of my sensibility have got quite a decent rubdown in the process. For me, as a writer, all this is good. For you, as a reader, it may be really dubious.

Anyway recently I put e-pen to e-paper on the third version of Kaos. It is not a “draft”. It is a new book. The previous two versions sit quietly on my desktop, glowering. They know when they’ve been mistreated, and they are there, ready to rub salt into any wound they can detect, and there are plenty of those.

This process has been interesting to me partly because the “storyline” of this book is quite clear to me, and was before I started the first version. The characters were there; the events were there; the “moral” or premise was there…and it was a stultifyingly boring endeavour as it worked out. Version one ran out of puff about 45,000 words as I recall, and what puff there had been in the last little while was artificial and “stort in a porm” as Spooner might have it. The second go didn’t get very far; I was wandering in a fog, stumbling over obstacles whose nature was unclear to me, so I stopped where I was at some point and waited for the air to clear.

This time, I think, is different – maybe. It’s more than 10,000 words, and some of those are sadly very ill-chosen. I got off the track too and had to go back a few thou to hook back into it. But it has the right feel so far, if I am able to keep the different aspects of what I am trying to do in my head.

The big deal about all of this to me is structural. I want to cast a new light on what happens, so that the reader is left with a particular set of impressions that enable her or him to – to – to – BE CONFUSED. No, that’s not quite right…to make up her or his own mind about the meaning, not to have me force feeding it to them: for me, that’s the ultimate aim of readers being engaged, that they will make my book their book, own it properly.

When I first started writing, I was in thrall to Ted Hughes, the then poet laureate of Britain, and widower of another (American) poet, Sylvia Plath who’d killed herself*, but most importantly author of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I admire this book a great deal many years later, and something Hughes argued about Shakespeare I have tried, in my own fashion, to work into my novels.

What he said was that the Bard had a dual or multi-level approach in his “great period” that allowed the groundlings – the common herd – to enjoy his plays on one level, while there were clues to a deeper meaning meant to be picked up by the inner circle of the cults he was involved with. The England of the time was apparently awash with these wee beasties; there were “circles” exploring and/or espousing all manner of interesting theories about life, the universe, and yes, everything!

Among the movers and shakers of this demi-monde was one Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk whose memory systems were his calling card, a sort of parlour trick. Bruno could reel off vast slabs of text – twenty or thirty pages at a time – from his system, which early in his career opened doors for him in Italy, including an audience with the Pope. But he went on, and on, and in his urge to heal the rifts in Christianity through a sort of new religion based on the works of a certain Hermes Trismegistus, who was meant to have lived even before Moses, he ultimately found himself on top of a burning stack of wood in a square in Rome. Four hundred years later half a million people went to that square and demanded that the Pope pardon Bruno for his alleged transgressions, a demand that was spurned. Anyway Bruno was flitting around London in the early 1590s and was spreading his enlightened views through these various groups. It is said Shakespeare satirised him as Berowne in Love’s Labour Lost.

Bruno was far from alone. “Magi” peopled London, and Europe throughout the renaissance, and they had a curious relationship both with religion and with science. Shakespeare’s Tempest, often cited as his crowning achievement, shows the magus in full flower. Frazer’s Golden Bough, a twelve volume examination of the rise of religion through magic, could just as easily have been written on the rise of science through magic: Bruno was after all a monk, and his ideas about the universe (largely cribbed from the classical Lucretius’ On the nature of things) were in aid of something grander and larger even than controlling nature: it was all about knowing God, coming face to face with our Creator.

The renaissance took this hidden knowledge seriously, aped the Greeks in their mystical cults, and people like Shakespeare developed literary techniques to slake the thirst.

Well, my idea from the first of my books has been to employ a dual-level, or multi-level approach: there must always be more, and the “more” has to have some distinguishing characteristics. The story must be a good one, a “page turner” as some people say, without any particular moral or philosophical dimension, even when (as with my novel The Russian Idea) philosophy is a part of the plot. That book to me is a bit of a failure because there is too much of this, and it gets in the way of the rattling good yarn that is the basis of my approach to writing.

But that can never be all there is; it has to be in aid of something, and I want it not just to be there for readers, but to be opaque…clear but not clear. My views on race, and religion, and tolerance, and politics and so on are my own, and of course I would like readers to share them – but I am not insisting, and not beating anyone over the head with them. Instead I am saying, or trying to say, “These things matter. What do you think about them?” in ways that are intended to provoke a response, a wrestling of the imagination, by my er possibly far from adoring public.

It is not clear just now if I actually have a public, so it is more than faintly presumptuous of me to think I have a purchase on this writing arena. But I would like to, and a great deal of the trouble I have had with Kaos relates to this: to create a “rattling good yarn” that is morally and philosophically compelling in a secondary way – pick it up if you like, or pay absolutely no attention to it if you don’t and you can still enjoy the read – is in this case proving to be a mighty big ask.

But I’m asking it of me, and this time maybe I’m getting somewhere. We’ll see…thanks for reading…It’s Christmas just now so have a good one.

*His next wife also committed suicide. There is a great deal that is troubling about this, and must have been to him.

More more more!

As I've gone along trying to sort out this new book of mine, Kaos, I am frequently reminded just how appropriate the title is: what a mess! Every "good idea" I have about it becomes a very, very bad idea within a day or two - only to swing back into favour some time later, mean and resentful at being discarded for some pathetic, twisted and even disgusting wee wrinkle on the rotting flesh of this novel's corpus.

As Kaos came to me while I was working on a book partly about Dostoevsky, while I was reading this great Russian writer and thinker, I've gone back to this source as I've run into trouble with the book - and been told how the techniques he used are now frowned upon: the use of an "external" narrator especially, but also the involved congeries of relationships that today sees his novels prefaced with a character list so readers can sort them out when they get confused - as they do.

It's all true. Indeed, it's even worse! Dostoevsky not only used these now passe techniques, he abused them, made a real hash of them. Here are some examples: in House of the Dead, his thinly disguised account of life in a Russian prison, his central character initially murdered his wife, but as he nears release he becomes - as Dostoevsky was - a "political" prisoner. In The Adolescent, his next to last novel, he changed the name of a secondary character two thirds of the way through its serialisation, but did not bother even to make the name consistent when it was published in book form.

But these are tiny peccadilli compared to the serious ah, "theoretical" difficulties Dostoevsky ran into and bulldozed over. In Demons, a novel with a narrator, there are scenes involving two characters that no one else could have known about to report what happened, scenes vital to the story and its meaning. Did Dostoevsky care about this? It doesn't seem so. When it was too hard to figure out how the narrator could have found out about something, Dostoevsky just switched out of that mode and became the all-seeing, all-knowing god writers so often like to be.

So why would Dostoevsky adopt this "narrator" technique that he used and abused so casually? At times it seems totally unnecessary. With Karamazov especially the narrator seems pointless - he is writing some time after the events he describes, so obviously takes no part in them, and is all but forgotten by the reader, when he is not actually forgotten. Perhaps Dostoevsky intended to bring the action up to the time of the narrator...but even then, he could easily have got along without him.

And he too gets in the way. The murderer in Karamazov confesses to Ivan just before hanging himself; Ivan suddenly comes down with an attack of delirium tremens and isn't believed - but the scene in which the murderer confesses is written as if that is how it actually happened. If Karamazov had been written as most novels are written nowadays, with no narrator apart from the author, who silently manipulates everything, this would not be a problem - it only becomes a problem because Dostoevsky makes it one.

It is even messier with Demons. The narrator is a part of things in that harrowing book, and his naivte helps the narrative work. Very early in his account he reveals that though a part of the "set" of a central character, he had not known crucial things about him. That tells the reader - well, this is what I think - that not everything the narrator is going to say can be taken at face value. It gives the writer a certain freedom, and sparks a frisson the reader may enjoy - to know that what is on the page is at least partly a mask for something else, that even at the end the "truth" may still prove elusive.

To me this is the attraction of the "narrator" technique: that it allows a writer to conceal and reveal in interesting ways that otherwise would not be possible. Perhaps the most famous use of this is by Agatha Christie, whose Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first person narration by - the murderer.* What seems to be a disinterested account by a bystander turns out to be part of a scheme to conceal "who done it". When the murderer confesses (before doing away with himself) it is not gloating - he's been sprung, and his scheme is a failure, so he fesses up.

Demons' narrator never really takes an important role; he is there, watching and listening, and occasionally performing small errands for one or another of the more important characters, and there is a feeling, never confirmed, that he falls in love with one of them. What matters about him is his implicit unreliability as a witness - the reader can't be sure, as she or he is reading, that this witness has got it right. And in the end, it turns out not to matter - that what counts is the sheer messiness of life, an unpredictability that destroys all pretense of forcing society, and thereby our understanding, into a mould: the central point of the book. Dostoevsky thus gives this technique a kind of thematic force that to me is very impressive.

And this is my idea now, till I have another one.

* Yes, this is a "spoiler", but this book was first published nearly 90 years ago, and anyway, anyone reading this post is not likely to be a fan of Agatha Christie. And if s/he is a fan, and hasn't read it yet - why haven't you? Wikipedia spoils it too.

Mr Theodore D

One of my least favourite books by Dostoevsky is Notes from Underground.* Serious literary people, who know a lot more than I do about everything, have a very high regard for this book, and it is easy to see why. There are purely literary techniques at work in Notes that are admirable and characteristic of this amazing writer. One of these could even be called his chief technique: the use of a narrator/amanuensis. House of the Dead, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov also all use this technique of an observer who is if not remote from the action, not really significant to it except as observer or editor/scribe, yet whose existence puts the "facts" open to dispute. Notes and House of the Dead use a kind of transcriber rather than observer, and in Notes he tires of his task so that the outpourings of the "author", while continuing, will no longer be published....a very exact form of censorship!

Notes is highly regarded as a turning point in Dostoevsky's career and has been hailed as an "existential" novel, even the first existential novel. It does have some Kierkegaardian overtones (undertones perhaps would be better), to the degree that it is certainly possible that Dostoevsky was influenced by Kierkegaard in writing it. Yet for me, Notes is a bore, especially the first part, where the "author" takes the prevailing liberal politics to pieces. The ideas he attacks are so plainly false that it is hard, at this distance in time at least, not to think Dostoevsky was destroying ideas no one actually held, till some background reading reveals that indeed some very peculiar notions were all the rage among the "intelligentsia" in Russia in the 1860s and 70s (and beyond!). Marxism and materialism in general were swallowed then without chewing, with added spices untasted by any others anywhere. That's not the yawn of it, though - threaded through the text he drones on and on essentially (existentially?) about his right to be unpleasant, and the resentment that has provoked his unpleasantness. It is undeniable that this right exists, but hardly needs saying, and the resentment he describes as all too universal is more childish than that. What seems to strike people as praiseworthy is the honesty, especially of its second part. Perhaps.

In any case a bad book by this great writer may be better than a good book by many another.

Dostoevsky grabbed me about the time Celine did, in the 1970s, and possibly for similar reasons; the author seemed to get under the skin of society and of the individual person at the same time, and seemed even more in Dostoevsky's case to understand what it is that drives people to extremes. Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to sympathetically portray edgy personalities even as he disapproved of them, of their motives, and of their actions. And he could be, like Celine, very funny. He also had a wonderful way of mocking his own beliefs - beliefs he wanted readers to accept and use in their own lives - while giving eloquent support to ideas he found repellent. As a result just what Dostoevsky really thought is not always clear. Digging for these nuggets may not be rewarded with gold: like Celine, Dostoevsky was an anti-
semite, though his dislike of Jews was tempered by the Christian spirit. Many of his views on a wide range of subjects seem quaint when not bizarre to 21st century eyes...and yet...

Yes, "and yet"...What Dostoevsky saw clearly shone crystalline. Demons, inspired by the revolutionary nihilist Sergei Nechaev's murder of a student, was an eerie, indeed frightening and all too prophetic look at what the revolutionaries Russia was producing in abundance in the 1870s would get up to once they had power.** Karamazov, though it is technically incomplete in the sense that Dostoevsky planned to continue the saga of the Karamazov family in at least an additional volume, is even more incredible: like all great writing, it not merely repays re-reading, but demands it of those who wish to try at least to drink full measure from this writer's bountiful fountain of insight.

While I was writing my last novel, The Russian Idea, I read and re-read a heap of Dostoevsky - not just most of the novels and stories but the "post-modern" journal he published before leaving off to write Karamazov, A Writer's Diary.*** What started for me as homage to the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev^ ended a composite with Dostoevsky. While I was writing it, the storyline came to me for my present book, Kaos.

Kaos has not been an easy write, and I've dropped it in order to think things through - and this post is an expression of that. One of the elements of Dostoevsky's writing that I have more or less ignored, now seems essential to me: the labyrinthine network of interrelationships that characterise what I regard as his finest work: The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. All these feature an enormous cast.

In Dostoevsky's day, when novels were first published as serials in magazines, such vast tapestries were not merely possible but all but expected. Today, following the notion of telegraphy via Celine, they are harder to muster and sustain. All the same, today I reckon it's the key to my present difficulties. Stop the chatter, Steve, and get on with it. Your underground man awaits his day.

* When I read Notes, it was in an old Everyman edition that treated Dostoevsky as if he was a new chum on the English-language literary block, and referred to him as "Theodore", the English version of Fyodor. Hence the title to this post.

** There is my own take on this at work in my novel The Russian Idea.

*** Roughly half of this interesting journal has been translated. It gives, among other things, the real flavour of Dostoevsky's thinking, and shows his anti-semitism in full flower. Indeed, in more than one way, it is similar to Celine's pamphleteering.

^Berdyaev regarded himself as a follower - he called himself a sprout - of Dostoevsky. For more on this you will just have to read The Russian Idea, whether my own or Berdyaev's, or Berdyaev's book Dostoevsky. Berdyaev's Russian Idea and Dostoevsky are in print. I have not written a post on Berdyaev, but will one day. For an interesting account of Dostoevsky as a religious prophet and the tradition he fits in, see Nicholas Zernov's Three Russian Prophets.

Moving On

This blog is about writing and this is the twenty-fifth post, twenty-sixth if you count the “blog hop” immediately preceding this one on wordpress, which I am not really. Twenty-five is roughly twenty-four more than I thought I’d manage to finish, so it is something of a milestone for me if for no one else. There are people with blogs who seem to write a dozen a week or even more, and many of these are thoughtful and creative. So I am but a tyro.

Till now, what I’ve mainly tried to do is discuss the people and ideas shaping my thinking as I’ve gone about writing my books. To my surprise this has been fun most of the time, and the process has helped clarify what I had previously imagined was already clear. This may explain why I have kept going far beyond what I thought I could do.

The previous post was again about Celine, the French writer whose three “pamphlets” containing anti-semitic themes ostracised the once-lion of twentieth century literature. It was a hard post to write, and though it is ok, I was far from happy with it when I admitted defeat and pressed the “publish” button.

Partly this stemmed from the many ideas I got while writing it – ideas that went in and out of the text not seldom, about writing, about why people write, and why people read, especially fiction, and how those feed into more fundamental questions about life as it “really is”. There are not surprisingly relationships there that run deep and give complexity a good name. As a writer, I can probe my own motivations and confess that I write because I need to – because I feel compelled to do it, even if that is not entirely satisfactory as an answer: there is a question implicitly raised by it (“All right, why are you compelled?”) that no amount of soul-searching may satisfy…. Anyway it is true I’ll write till I die or at least am no longer physically capable, whether people read my books or not. Readers are by contrast not compelled – they don’t have to read (or I don’t think so). There is moreover a great range of means to satisfy whatever urges they might have – escape, or knowledge for example: films, television, games.* Fiction – the novel – is not guaranteed an audience.

The novel is a relatively recent phenomenon; that is presumably why it is called a novel. It is true that there are traces of fiction in western civilisation going back a long way – to Aesop I suppose, and beyond, if we consider fiction to have its roots in fable and myth. Asian civilisation had novels, or what nowadays pass for novels, for a very long time before the novel became an established form in the west: Monkey in China, and Tale of Genji in Japan, for example.

The novel in the west really began in the 18th century and didn’t become a wild success till the 19th. Yes there were novels in Shakespeare’s time – Greene’s Pandosto was the model for The Winter’s Tale – but unless one is a specialist, no one today goes near them. Before that there were “tales” – by Boccaccio, Chaucer and others. But we are really, as readers and writers, following conventions shaped with Fielding and Defoe and their kin and codified, embellished and expanded by a large number of 19th century masters – Austen, Balzac, Dickens…A great deal of this has to do with technological advance, and the sudden availability of cheap magazines and books, and with the literacy that went with it. Where in 1600 the way to reach a wide public was on the stage, by the mid-19th century at the latest the printed book had become a mobile theatre, available wherever you happened to be, whenever you happened to want to crack it.

Talking like this risks Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concresence” – explaining the history of human thought by materialism. It’s not like that at all. Reading is the most complicated skill humans typically possess, but why they read is different, especially as I think people read novels for the ideas in them, even if they don’t recognise that is why they do it. Fiction is morality writ fab – and “morality” is really philosophy. All fiction, whether it is genre fiction or not, is a kind of philosophical treatise.** The process of “reasoning” is presented as a dramatic process, a commentary on life that is at bottom philosophical, even by definition philosophical. In terms of the novel most “how-to” fiction-writing books will advise authors to have a “premise” before starting to write: a philosophical proposition, though few would consciously acknowledge this. A novel’s premise doesn’t have to be a statement for all time about everything, just for the novel itself. Nonetheless, it is a form of philosophy. The premise for Kaos, the novel I am writing and finding hard going at the moment, is “The road to hell is paved with fun”. Plainly, this is not true all of the time, or perhaps even very often: but in this particular book it is true because the “author as god” (me) decrees it.

When this occurred to me, this idea of the novelist as philosopher, whether s/he likes it or not, it was a bit embarrassing. The thought “You mean you’ve only just realised this, as you work on your eighth novel?” jostled with “You mean the author of a cheap trashy romance, say in the Mills & Boon class, is a philosopher?” The answer to both these questions is yes and no.

Naturally, I have regarded my own work as something beyond Mills & Boon, and I have thought of my books as “novels of ideas” – as in the post about “wit”, I have always had a serious purpose, “something to say”. But the notion that every writer including every trashy romance or hard core porn author is by definition a kind of philosopher is very appealing to me, humbling and exalting at the same time.

Put this way, it is so obvious you’d think it scarcely needs saying – but it does. The other day I picked up a book by a man named G Wilson Knight, a Shakespeare scholar, who in 1930 rocked that narrow slice of intellectual landscape with a book whose title came from Lear, The Wheel of Fire. Knight seems to have been provoked into writing what is now a classic of Shakespearian interpretation by a trend disowning any philosophical notion in Shakespeare; he found himself criticised for regarding Shakespeare as a “philosophical poet rather than a man of the stage”. Knight’s spirited rejoinder was that he was a philosophical poet who was a man of the stage and that he would not be performed today if he were not.

Shakespeare may have been the greatest writer in history, but he is not set apart as a philosophical poet: what is surprising to me, having gone through this in my mind, is that Knight’s point had to be argued at all. Yet it did.

Wait! There’s more!

Putting the idea of “novel as philosophy” together with Wittgenstein, and the idea of philosophy as language makes a very neat fit. Beyond the rules of our language that all speakers and writers follow, the “language games” that comprise the rules in linguistic philosophy as I understand Wittgenstein to mean it, are in genre novels such as the thriller which I have been writing, set by the genre. The writer has to adhere to these on one level at least to provide the satisfaction readers want. Breaking those rules makes for failure. Shakespeare, my own primary model in writing, dragged playgoers in to spend their coppers by keeping to the rules of the kinds of drama he wrote – but by providing something more at the same time. In my writing, that has always been my aim.

Yet genre fiction imposes requirements that can exhaust the moral force of a writer, and turn what s/he writes into a commodity, indistinguishable from others of its type, be it romance, thriller, police procedural or whatever. Any reader who has not encountered fiction like this has led – well, has read – a golden life.

The question for me, that was raised in me by Celine’s Bagatelles was how much I had allowed the rules of genre to impose on me, whether I had blunted or even thwarted my purposes by consciously choosing a genre and sticking too slavishly to “the rules”.

I have now written eight novels. Five of them are “published” via smashwords and three lie a-mouldering in my “bottom drawer” for different reasons. What reading Bagatelles provoked in me more than anything was the thought that perhaps I have exhausted my ability to conform to the genre rules and that I must either break them, find another genre, or break free, if I am to succeed as I wish to succeed: to reach people with messages that challenge and move them, that make their lives more enjoyable, more interesting, more fulfilling, more fun.

There is, of course, only one Celine. He broke lots of rules; some of his transgressions, as we know, made him a major literary force while others shrivelled him up to at best a minor figure, a curiosity.***

Even so, he presents challenges to all writers: “first you’ve got to pay for it, then you can use it”.

Of course there many ways writers can use their life experiences to “inform” their writing. Not every novel has to be autobiographical. What evidence there is suggests Celine held genre writing in contempt^, but as I’ve discussed on this blog in the past, writers can imaginatively encounter experiences one would never dream of having in real life, or at least should not – like murder.

“In the future you’ll telegraph or you won’t write at all.”

Celine laughed at his use of the ellipse and other punctuation though he was probably being ironic, at least a little bit. But there is more to this: According to his theory of writing the richly evocative descriptive passage was finished: people are too busy. Yet there are ways and ways, as one of his translators noted. Take this description of a suburban sub-division:

“Not a one that can stand up right…A collection of toys plunked down in the shit!”

Two little sentences (admittedly preceded by some other description) that sum up the emergent mania for suburbia at the end of the Belle Epoque in France – anything for that villa! The cynical perspective of the observer, who cannot see the mud as a future lawn or garden (or even paved road), who notices the poor construction standards and the miniaturisation of floor space to make these contraptions affordable…there is even more there, in his contempt – resentment, as anyone who reads the book concerned (Mort a Credit [Death on the Instalment Plan]) will know: the engagement by the author is an engagement of emotion. Is it the description, or the emotion, that is the point? It turns out to be both.

My plan now – yes, I have a plan – is to try to adjust what I am doing to this approach, which involves rethinking Dostoevsky as well as rethinking me. That really calls for another post as this one has gone on long enough. Dear reader, your perseverance and good humour means so much! Thank you…

*Certainly there is a great range of pastimes available to us all; what I am getting at here is “brain fodder”.

** The same is true of any made-up story, whether presented as film, on the stage, etc.

***Milton Hindus, a would-be supporter when Celine was in exile in Denmark and who visited him there, wrote a (not very good) book on his experience with the apt title Crippled Giant.

^As a doctor Celine might have been expected to find medical novels interesting; he said they bored him.

No mere bagatelle

This blog is mostly about writing and this is the 24th post. It is also the fourth draft, a bad sign. Initially I had thought this would be a kind of swan song, a farewell to the difficulty I have had with the French writer Celine, ever since he first burst into my consciousness in the 1970s. Discovering that one of Celine’s three “anti-semitic” pamphlets had been translated into English, I reckoned that at last I would be able to make up my own mind about what he was on about, to consign him to some pigeonhole or other, and move on.

It hasn’t worked out like that. Reading Bagatelles pour un massacre, translated (anonymously) as Trifles for a massacre, has not settled Celine into a comfortable spot in my spirit, even a little bit. Instead this “pamphlet” – it is nearly 350 pages long – set my mind on a wild ride; yet again this exasperating man has challenged me about fundamentals: about writing, about thinking, ultimately about life itself. I suppose I was foolish to imagine it would be otherwise, that he would not find a way to get under my skin.

There is some sort of explanation for this: Celine used his life as the source material if you like for his fiction, and the life he led put him “out there” – exposed with all his idiosyncracies to very, very public view. The result was a blend of fantasy and reality that is at the very least spectacular. There was nothing easy about him; many of his opinions weren’t just unfashionable but were highly objectionable, offensive even to his adoring public and friends. The painter Gen Paul, a long-time comrade, was so stung by his thinly disguised portrayal in the post-war novel Normance that he was unable ever to trust Celine again: it was almost as if Celine relished the ostracism his writing provoked, yet he complained again and again about how badly he was treated.

Despite the anti-semitism, Celine’s reputation has otherwise recovered in the past generation.

Of course his stature is relative: most people have never heard of him. If you google his name you will get many more hits of Celine Dion. Yet Celine’s rehabilitation if not complete has been nonetheless wholesale: almost all his works have been translated from the original French into English and other languages, he has websites devoted to him, there are photo books of his tumultuous life; you can buy the t-shirt with his photo on it. In his last book he wrote that “in two hundred years I’ll be helping the kids through high school” but perhaps he won’t have to wait that long. Some of his work has been translated as obvious university study material, with English on one page and the original French on the facing page.

Is he worth it? Does he deserve the t-shirt? Until a few years ago, that was impossible to say for anyone reading him in translation, and almost for any Francophone: the writing that caused so much trouble during his life, and had by the deliberate common consent of the literary establishment, in France and elsewhere, been regarded as outside the pale, was no longer easy to get in its original editions and was not (and is not) reprinted, though it is available online.

Now that Bagatelles is available however anyone can see what the fuss was about without taking anyone’s word for it, even if the other two “anti-semitic pamphlets” – Les Beaux Draps (The fine mess) and L’ecole des cadavres (School for corpses) – are still off the menu. Bagatelles is enough to see the basis for Celine’s ostracism. Though he has also been criticised for his activities during the war, in particular letters and interviews he wrote and gave, he denounced some of the material appearing under his name at the time as deliberate forgeries aimed by Germans and collaborators at tying him into support of the Nazis, and pointed the finger at his accusers for collaboration. Notably he gave Sartre, who had once championed him (his first novel, La nausee [Nausea] was prefaced with a quotation from Celine’s play, L’eglise, The Church), a very rough time: his reply to Sartre can be found on the net.

It is also true – though it doesn’t say anything for or against Celine – that collaboration was widespread in France during the German occupation, that protest was at best muted when Jews were deported to be slaughtered in the camps, and that attacks on collaborators and alleged collaborators have more than a tinge of a guilty conscience.

Celine answered the charges against him after the war with characteristic invective and claimed in his last book that he was, and had always been, an anarchist, and it is hard to square his supposed support for Nazism with some of his remarks about Hitler and “Aryan baloney”.

In spite of all this, it seems to me to be a kind of sideshow, a distraction. What is proper with a writer is to look at her or his work as literature, to read it on its own terms, whatever these may be, before interposing judgment on even the most outrageous ideas. Judgment, to be fair, has to come later. So what my plan here is, is to treat >i>Bagatelles as literature, to examine it, and its arguments, from that perspective. Celine was a genius without doubt, and to respond to his genius we really need to approach his work seriously, and not to dismiss anything at all out of hand.

On any level Bagatelles is an incredible book. It is often screamingly funny, and its many barbs are frequently sharp and pointed in the right ways: his attacks on French drunkenness and on the Soviet Union must have made uncomfortable reading for French intellectuals – indeed French people – when Bagatelles was first published, but for the first he makes a striking and well-documented case, and for the second its truth is now widely acknowledged.

That is very far from all. Celine rips through the French literary establishment with customary vigour, and his analysis of global fiction is interesting and perceptive. His denunciation of the modern media is also, to paraphrase John Major, “not entirely without merit”.

Schematically Bagatelles is an advance on his previous novels because it takes the “novel as delirium” another step: whereas Mort a Credit retains the formal fictional structure of a novel, Bagatelles begins as a novel only to transpose into non-fiction – maybe. Ferdinand becomes Celine, becomes Ferdinand. This is artfully contrived.

All this however skirts around Celine’s core themes. As the title suggests Bagatelles sees the coming conflict with Germany and seeks to persuade France to avoid it, to refuse to become embroiled in war with Germany. (As an aside, when he “lost the argument”, he volunteered immediately and became a ship’s doctor on a vessel that was sunk in the early days of the war.).

And it does this from a perspective that is both astonishing and alarming. It turns out that there is a global conspiracy, and that the French aspect of this conspiracy has the Jews undermining everything in a grand plan to take over the world. Everywhere he looks, Ferdinand/Celine finds the dread hand of the Jew…not just finance, but communism! not just politics but film, not just film but the editorial policies of newspapers and book publishers, not just that but the vineyards debauching the French nation, not just that but…there is nowhere the Jew is not judging, scheming, conniving, thwarting…thrusting France into a cataclysm with Germany, when if there is an enemy, it is the Soviet Union. He has been there, and seen what it is really like, and it is not pretty.

And the greatest undermining of all – of the ethnicity of the French people. What scheming wee creeps can’t achieve, sex will…later in his life, Celine imagined the Chinese taking over (“the Chinese in Brest”) and achieving the same magical result: no more France, no more French (he then called the French “Vrounzais” to show the bastardisation of “French blood” by immigrants).

Celine constructs this argument far more cunningly than I have managed to make it seem here. He has a Jewish friend to show that he does not conflate every single Jew with the “Jewish conspiracy”, and even has this friend slagging off “the Jews” with the same invective Celine will later employ; his Jewish boss in the League of Nations gets equal measure of brickbat and bouquet: he takes care, that is, to distinguish the individual, the personal, from the “ism” even as he mocks this view, and mocks himself for holding it!

The friend shows true friendship too, and ends warning Ferdinand/Celine of the consequences of his irrational attacks on “the Jews”, just as does his non-Jewish artist mate.

To Jewish people what is not highly offensive about this is not worth thinking about, but those who should be most offended are the French. Indeed, whatever crimes Celine may find to lay at the door of the Jews are as nothing compared to the weakness and uselessness of the French people. So the Jews are in control of the alcohol industry? Who makes French people drink it? (Celine became a teetotaller at some stage).* The Jews are in control of the French novel, of French literature and literary journals, and the international fiction markets? Who makes anyone read the output? See the films? Go to the theatre? The ballet? Celine goes on and on and on about the fecklessness of the French, their hopelessness…their uselessness…the truth as he recounts it is that the French are too weak to resist. It is already too late.

And this is the contradiction in Celine’s account of reality: the massacre he seeks to avoid is already pre-ordained, and the plea he makes is already certain to be ignored, by his own testimony.

Worse, the vision he evokes to avoid the impending slaughter is in itself flawed. Who are these “French”? There is no static “French nation” any more than any other “nation”; the France of Celine’s time had a different ethnic mix and geographical extent than fifty years before, and fifty years before that and before that…One can find maps of “France” stretching to the banks of the Rhine, and if one looks back far enough, maps of France taking in England! That is to say, the “French people” have been a mixture of peoples more or less forever, so what is the big deal with adding new elements? Er, none whatsoever. Celine claimed, over and over, that he didn’t mind Jews as long as they stayed out of France. He saw Jews as “negroid” people, and he said he didn’t mind blacks on the same basis. He had a great time in Africa and the only thing he didn’t like was “tom-tom” music (presumably referring to the jazz of his time); he just wanted Africans to stay in Africa, and Jews to stay in Palestine.

People don’t behave like that and it is impossible not to think that Celine knew this as well as anyone. Later he described warfare as “movements of peoples”, and his “Chinese in Brest” remark was more aware than anti-semitism allows.

Celine wanted to be judged on the basis of his “novel as delirium”, even when he didn’t mean it. It was clever, indeed ingenious, but in this sense a failure. He could say, “Bagatelles comprises the delirious ravings of a paranoid man and should not be taken seriously as argument”**, but there is far too much serious argument in it for that claim to succeed. The section on drunkenness for example, is crammed with facts and shows evident research, and the sections on literature and fellow writers far from crazed. It is in this sense, ultimately, that Bagatelles is a failure: as literature. It was a bold and even courageous attempt to push ahead a theory of writing that Celine had already established as his own, but he allowed his real preoccupations to get in the way.

This supposed pamphlet is nearly 350 pages long, and many of the “arguments” in it are repeated, when the new versions add little if anything. Even the (very funny) jokes are repeated, embellished and elaborated, but too worn for effect. If Celine were writing today, using a PC with all the text editing tools available to anyone able to ”hunt and peck” on a keyboard and use a mouse, he very well may have delivered a much different text to his reading public. There seems to this reader to be a great deal of “draft” in Bagatelles, as if Celine was keen to get the thing out and couldn’t be bothered going through proofs and rewriting again and again. And it is precisely in those parts that are the most offensive that the most repetition is found – it is as if he couldn’t be sure which bit bit better so left them all in, hoping the teeth would not seem worn by the end.

After his excursion into politics, Celine’s writing became overelaborated; his impressionistic and emotional colouration became too much really. It took nearly a decade before he realised this wasn’t working and retreated to a more restrained style, that was all the more elegant and eloquent for it. Before he published Normance, the second part of Fable for another time, he seemed to believe that it would be welcomed by his public as a great literary advance. To me, it is almost unreadable.

Bagatelles is not unreadable. Its anti-semitic diatribes are unfortunate, in that on any level, from argument through to art, they fail. In my second novel, Evilheart, the protagonist argues that the “petit bourgois” foundation of anti-semitism enfeebles anti-semitic art and that writers and others’ anti-semitism shows through in their work as weakness, and never as strength. The argument traverses Wagner – a notorious anti-semite – and painters including Cezanne and Degas, both “anti-Dreyfusards”, seeing in the former a willingness to put this view aside when picking up the brush, and in the latter a more limited palette: Degas lost important patrons because of his refusal to stop propagandising on behalf of those who believed Dreyfus guilty.*** Celine started out as Degas, and finished, shall we say, as Cezanne. In a later interview he said he got involved in things that were none of his business, “to do with the Jews”.

But he did not resile, or recant; he never changed. He just left it out, referring to the trouble he had got into, but not, as with the three “pamphlets”, foaming at the mouth over the Jewish cabal. Yet the anti-semitism and the amazing insights into life as it is lived by all of us, that “life of quiet desperation” as the American Thoreau put it, live cheek by jowl. They can’t really be separated in this man: where he succeeded as a writer he transformed this kind of hatred into a generalised hatred, and he transformed his beliefs into general ones, not about France, not about Jews, but about life. In these passages, and these themes, and they are many, he remains one of the greatest writers ever.

Anti-semitism is a characteristic of the petit-bourgeois milieu in any society – those people who are not “workers” and who despise them, and who envy, fear and hate those above them. Celine mined these emotions in ways never before seen, and handled since but awkwardly. Evilheart‘s protagonist has Celine’s characters ending up “at the wrong end of the pool cue”. ass in the air and about to get reamed…in Bagatelles Celine frequently speaks of a gnat being reamed by an elephant…the way I feel about him, when he’s on about life he has transcended his background to speak universal truth, and when he is on about Jews he has succumbed to it.

Bagatelles begins and ends with ballet scripts the author hopes to have staged.**** Later on, these and others were published with the tongue-in-cheek title Ballets without music, without dancers, without anything. So far as I know, no music has ever been written for them and they have never been performed. Not all of them are great, but the ones in Bagatelles are not at all bad, and it would be interesting to see them produced.

When I first encountered Celine, he was liberating to me, both in a literary and a personal sense. He stood up and took the hits for the most incredible ideas, and he could write like no one else had ever written. His sad verdict on life was tempered by a kind of perverse optimism – “So life is futile. What are you going to do about it?”

Celine’s paradoxical answer to that question is found in Bagatelles. It is a tragic answer, futility piled on futility. His motives may have been sick, and even evil, but he gains full marks in my book for the courage he showed then and after. This has been a great lesson for me, and I am still thinking about it.

* There is some evidence that Celine was an alcoholic, or had alcoholic tendencies, and that he stopped drinking as a result. In his second novel his character is shall we say led astray by drink, and by the time of Bagatelles Celine is anti-drink; in his last trilogy he says more than once that he drinks only water.

**This is me putting words into Celine’s mouth.

***Any good biography of Degas will recount his attitudes; Evilheart goes on about what it meant for his art.

****Naturally, the Jews stand in the way…in Paris as in Russia…


(Edit)
Leave a comment
Posted by Steve Evans on November 6, 2012 in Uncategorized

Tags: anti-semitism, bagatelles-for-a-massacre, celine, evilheart, Sartre

Wit

Or something like wit. This is the 23d post of this blog which is mostly about writing.

When I'm feeling defensive, which is not seldom, I say that my writing has "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre". I mean that, but it would be possible to say that thrillers aren't "frivolous" in any but a "not truly literature" sense. After all, they deal with death, with intrigue, with crime and sex, and those are pretty serious topics. What people mean when they say the genre is frivolous is only that the plots, and the characters are "stock" and fit into a formula, a format, that is shared with other thrillers.

There are other frivolous ways of being serious however - take Tom Sharpe.

For those unaware of him, Sharpe is an English satirical novelist; he manages to be viciously funny with an underlying serious intent, and because his novels are comic novels they are "by definition" frivolous. His first two novels were set in apartheid South Africa - he had been deported for "sedition" - and hilariously pull the regime to pieces. Some people say these were his best two books, but my favourite is The Great Pursuit, a novel that takes the stick to pretentious literary analysis and criticism of the F R Leavis variety. Possibly Sharpe was irked at not being taken seriously - if so, I understand that completely.

Well, whether he is a great novelist or not, Sharpe can be pretty funny. I'm envious of this wonderful talent that has an entirely different way of going about being "serious in a frivolous genre" than I have. I keep saying to myself that I should write a witty book, whether or not it comes up to the Sharpe edge of things, or has a different way of expressing what I have to say. But so far - I haven't. And Kaos, the book I'm working on now, doesn't seem to be making much room for the odd laugh. I'd like it to do that, but I find that sitting down and thinking up funny is entirely different from just being funny. The context of wit makes wit witty, and when I'm writing a novel, that context is usually not there.

Of course there are ways of going about this, and maybe that's what I'm trying to get at: just dropping the way I do things now, and adopting those ways. Raymond Chandler's advice in writing was "analyse, and emulate" and if one reads his books in that light, it is possible to see the emulation, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Having influences is fine - writers and other artists don't just create out of their heads; they live in a society and respond to what is around them, and other writers are among what is "around them". Tracing that interaction is part of the joy of understanding them. Shakespeare had a huge range of influences and sometimes more or less copied them - he put slabs of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in the North translation into his plays, just rendering them into blank verse from prose. He did the same with Holinshed's Chronicles. Yet somehow the copy outshone the original...Shakespeare couldn't be pinned down. He could write it sad, he could write it mad and bad, he could make you smile. It is not easy to defy categorisation in this way as J K Rowling is finding out.

Where was I? Oh, yes, funny. The Russian writer Gogol supposedly said that he laughed so he wouldn't cry - the Russia of his time being a pretty depressing place. As a teenager I loved his short story about a nose that left its owner (who'd complained because there was pimple on it) chasing it round as it leapt from face to face. How I laughed! But there was more to this than a teenager might have noticed, that a writer a few years on does: that nose's journey revealed Russians, Russia, real life masquerading as absurd, and while the nose raced around its catalogue of faces, the censor was avoided...

Well, Gogol even as a humorist was treated as a serious writer. Sharpe is not. My sex thrills and chills romps are not either.

I set out to write thrillers as a means of writing about serious subjects for people who don't usually read books with serious subjects in mind. I took this cue from er Shakespeare actually, who put bums on seats with tales of bloodlust, lust, intrigue, laughter, nastiness, wit, broad humour, and more. People paid the price of admission to have a good time, and they got it. Shakespeare was competing not just against other dramatists for the public's shilling, but bear-baiting and similar amusements. He had to deliver, and he did.

Nowadays he is regarded as an untouchable icon but in his own time he was feted - by Francis Meres for example - because he could do what I would like to do: deliver serious themes in "frivolous" dress. Others were writing "serious" at the time, aimed only at the educated classes. Shakespeare showed he could do it with his sonnets. But what we remember him for was in principle always accessible by anyone.

That's the attraction of humorous writing to me too: that you can treat quite serious, even complex, subjects, in ways that are accessible to people who wouldn't want to know otherwise.

Ben Elton has written a number of books like this, but unlike Sharpe, I think his books - the ones I've read - are failures. They betray their seriousness too much, and end up not being really funny. Then the focus is on the argument, and the argument can't be as well-put as a non-fiction argument, and it's just a bore anyway. Sorry, Ben. Fiction needs to affect to be convincing, not convince to be effective. There are (non-humorous) exceptions to this, at least in their own time - Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is perhaps the most notable, though a contemporary novel of the type is The Celestine Prophecy, a book I have never been able to bring myself to read.

So as I struggle away on Kaos, a book that is too serious by half, I would like to put some humour into it, to make people smile and even laugh. It would be nice to do that. But underlying that always, my "serious purpose in a frivolous genre".

If you've got this far give yourself a treat...go to the fridge, check it out, have a snack...or do a wee dance of the sort you would like to do when no one is looking...a true Fonteyn or Nureyev! Thanks for reading.