Reading 2024 - Various Continued: the Effect of Time on Humour

I have never forgotten a party my mother gave not long after she and my father divorced in the mid-1960s. My mother's best girlfriend arrived first. She and my mother stood by the window of our first floor drawing room and my mother pointed out a bright turquoise mini just drawing up. "That's Patrick Campbell", my mother told her friend. "Whatever you do don't mention the colour of his car as he's furious about it."

To my surprise some time later, when my mother's friend and Patrick Campbell found themselves standing side by side at the window at the edge of what was by then a throng of people, I heard my mother's friend open a conversation by saying:

"Look at that car - isn't it the most hideous colour? Can you imagine who would drive such a frightful thing?"

Campbell was at the time considered to be hilarious. He had come into our orbit because he was supposed to be writing something with a woman who lived across the street. I don't know if their collaboration bore fruit but the woman certainly left her husband for Campbell, and the husband subsequently killed himself. 

The events of this part of my life disturbed me as a child and they still do, while also puzzling me and making me feel a little sad.

The one thing I continued to cling to, regarding the marriage of the people across the road ending and its subsequent consequences, was the idea that Campbell was hilarious. In some obscure way, I felt that might give him license to behave badly. 

His manner suggested he believed himself funny. The reactions of others suggested they did too. I had never read anything he wrote, so I had to rely on the judgments of others - until the other day, when I saw two of his books in a secondhand bookshop. I bought them, thinking that, homewrecker though he had seemed to be, I would at least be entertained.

I wasn't. His pieces struck me as thin, uninspired and plodding. At some point, I might include some in a separate blog post to prove my point - or possibly hear from people who laughed uproariously and will accuse me of missing the point. 

Perhaps the problem is that humour dates. Or it might be something to do with Campbell's style going out of fashion. Yet Three Men in a Boat was published ages before Campbell became well known and it remains the funniest book ever written.  And as for style going out of fashion, Evelyn Waugh would have said that was a nonsensical proposition:

"Style", Waugh said, "is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance & individuality; these qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence.”

The books I bought by Campbell are illustrated by Ronald Searle and his style has definitely endured. As a result I am still glad I bought them.

I also bought a collection of the essays Alice Thomas Ellis used to write for the Spectator. These were not quite as good as I had found them when I used to read them in the magazine, but they still had many enjoyable moments. Here are my favourites:

1. She remarks about contemporary architects - 

"I should like to round them up and make them live in a tower block. For ever. When you see what they've done to our cities for ever is not long enough."

2. She claims that when truly melancholy:

"I don't want to read PG Wodehouse. When I'm really, really low only Strindberg makes me laugh."

3. As I am alarmingly untidy, I like her description of her approach to important papers:

"My system with documents and letters is usually to stuff them into the handbag of the moment until I can't close it any more and then I stuff that into the bottom of the wardrobe and buy a new one."

and her observation that "rearranging things gives me the illusion that one is tidying up."

4. She describes some pictures as being "oddly sinister in the way that only the Victorians could achieve", which seems a good insight to me.

5. The book was published way back in 1988 but already Thomas Ellis is describing how living in London she experiences "the hopeless feeling that faceless and ruthless powers are in control - local councils for the most part - ripping up the paving stones at random, closing down the little shops and authorising the erection of nightmarish mega-stores."

6. When she gets going on her loathing for cardboard boxes, she becomes unhinged enough to be truly hilarious, especially when her loathing for cardboard boxes and her dislike for Blue Peter combine, with a side reference to her hatred of pine plantations, a hatred I was particularly pleased to discover someone else nurtures (or at least used to nurture) since I have found many people think pine plantations are fine - or even, almost unbelievably, rather nice.

When I have time I might even type out the whole cardboard box essay and put it here so that other people can enjoy it, since I assume the book is no longer obtainable except by chance.

More Reading 2024 - Various Part One

Having read and enjoyed one novel by Christopher Beha I went on to read the two other novels he has written so far. The first was What Happened to Sophie Wilder. It was enjoyable but slightly baffling. Its most interesting story line deals with the demands put upon a young Catholic by a dying man. The subject of dying and how we go about it is pertinent and the resolution to the problem in this novel is unsatisfactory - or rather I found it so. Which doesn't mean to say that I did not enjoy reading the book or that my admiration diminished for Beha as he continues to create highly readable and interesting novels that do not play around with form but instead conjure up interesting characters facing the dilemmas of being human. 

The second novel I read by Beha (or the third in total) was Arts and Entertainments. The book concerns a man who, mainly because of economic pressure, becomes a participant in reality television. One of the quotations on the frontispiece is this, from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes :

What characterises so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs.

Once again, I am one hundred percent glad that Beha is writing the kinds of novels he does. However, with this one, I kept thinking The Truman Show covered the same territory pretty comprehensively. While Beha is interested in the nature of reality in a world of "reality" TV, I find this question only moderately interesting as I don't watch reality TV. Beha probably hopes to highlight our relationship to reality more generally, using reality TV merely as an emblem or paradigm. The character in the novel who controls the reality TV programme the central character gets involved in observes that he thinks watching things like the Superbowl on television is actually better than being in the stadium seeing it in real life. Given that many people at stadium events these days can't see the stage or the field and do watch most of the action on screens set around the event, one can in fact be present at an event and watch it on a screen simultaneously, as it happens. I guess it's worth highlighting such absurdities. 

Beha is also concerned with the fascination that we are encouraged to have for celebrities - but again I don't take much notice of celebrities and therefore I don't feel passionate about this element of modern life, while being aware that there are numbers of people who live in a strange bubble of fame and numbers of people who allow quite large chunks of their conscious thoughts to be taken up with speculation about those famous people. Before celebrities, royalty and the very rich occupied the same space in our imagination.

The reality TV programme controller, by the way, is a former priest who discovered when a television crew came to make a documentary about his monastery that he had actually not been looking for God all his life but for an audience. Having made this discovery, he left the priesthood and turned to TV. His comments about audiences suggest he sees an audience as an abstract entity not unlike a deity - or at the very least a force of some kind, in its own right:

"The audience only has one way of expressing its interest - by watching. They might watch because they love you. They might watch because they hate you. They might watch because they're sick. Doesn't matter. Is that good or bad? The question doesn't make any sense. Good is whatever the audience watches ... The audience is all there is."

The overwhelmingly pervasive nature of reality TV in the book makes it a failure for me. It is a satire but its exaggerated grotesquery does not marry well with its attempt to be a work of realism. In other words, having chosen to write a book that is supposed to be about people like the reader, living in a world like that in which the reader lives, Beha failed to convince me that the world he portrays, in which everyone is part of a television entertainment or part of that entertainment's audience, is real - just as I am unconvinced of the reality of anything presented as reality TV on my television. 

Never mind - there are great insights and interesting ideas dotted through the book and at no point did I get bored.

Restricted Vision

I was on a train from Paddington at commuter time. Everyone was preoccupied. Even walking up the platform to board, most people had their heads bent over their telephones. In the carriage some passengers began conversations about management, using ugly neologisms. Others flipped open laptops and frowned their way home, columns of figures and dense many stranded graphs filling their screens and possibly their minds. 

As we left London behind and entered open countryside I saw through the window the most beautiful sunset. I realised not one single person in the carriage other than me was looking out the window. Locked in a world filtered by earbuds and headphones, bent over their devices, their whole visual focus on those little lighted rectangles, they were missing reality. 

I thought for a moment of trying to alert them to the wonder outside: "Look! It's amazing! The colours, the glorious transcience (or transient glory?)" But I didn't want to be arrested or certified. 

I thought of the poem Adlestrop. I suppose such a poem is unlikely to be written any more.

Overhearing

When my children were very little and we'd been living in a non-English-speaking country for a while, we went back home to Australia. Our littlest called to her sister in extreme excitement when the telly was switched on:

"Come quickly, come quickly, they're speaking English!" she cried. 

I understand how she felt, in the sense that it is exciting, when you've been in a country where you are forever trying to learn the local language but never quite succeeding, to take a break and be surrounded by people you can understand. 

For instance, in a cafe I overheard a young woman at the table beside mine say, "I loved him." My ears pricked up, eager to hear a long romantic epic.

"In that BBC series", she went on.

Oh.

A Matter of Taste

Given that I loved it when Vic Reeves used to say "Uvavu", it may seem surprising that I have come to the realisation that anyone who uses the word "umami" is unworthy of attention. 

But it's intention that matters. Although the two words sound the same, one was uttered to provoke laughter while the other is used to show off, I reckon. 

After all, the English speaking world managed to talk about food for the best part of 2000 years without this addition to our vocabulary. Sure, as we became more familiar with the cuisines of South East Asia, so the word snuck in. But now it's used in almost any and every context. I even saw a reference to umami in relation to Yorkshire pudding and gravy recently. 

That's when it really came home to me that umami is just an extremely pretentious way of saying savoury. What does it add to the language except bafflement and a sense of them - the fancy pants foodies who write things like this:

- and us, the people who just eat stuff? In other words, it increases alienation, which is why I think it must go.

Reading 2024 - various

For a project I am occasionally working on, I've read, exceptionally slowly, with endless recourse to a dictionary, A Princess Remembers, the memoir of Eugénie Odescalchi, who was married to Baron Béla Lipthay.

Wedding picture of Baron Bela Lipthay and Princess Eugenie Odescalchi

The princess and her family endured a great deal of hardship in the early part of the twentieth century, but - possibly because she was exceptionally sweet-natured and a devout Catholic or possibly because her memoir was published before the fall of Communism - there is not a breath of complaint in the text of the book.

Anthony Wilding with Bela Lipthay and his brother, when Wilding lived with the family as tutor

For the same project, I read a book by Anthony Wilding and a book about Anthony Wilding. Both books can be found at Internet archive. The link to the biography is here. The link to the book by Wilding is here 

Each of these books gives glimpses of the world just before the First World War. Each glimpse deepens my sense that it was at the outbreak of that conflict that everything went horribly wrong. 

Wilding, by the way, was a New Zealander who won Wimbledon four times, and is considered by some the world's first tennis superstar. I suspect that no tennis superstar of today would ask his friend to send the following books to give him some light reading matter while staying at the Lipthays in 1907:

Robbery Under Arms

Browning's Poems

The Four Georges by Thackeray

Horace Walpole's Letters

Southey's Life of Nelson 

Romeo and Juliet

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

Earl of Chatham Macaulay

Clive Macaulay

Silas Marner George Eliot 

For my own pleasure, I read AN Wilson's How Can We Know.  I really liked it, particularly Wilson's understanding of the encounter between the rich young man and Jesus. When the rich young man goes away, after being told to sell his possessions, Wilson says that it is not Jesus but the young man who executes judgment on himself. Had the young man fallen "at the feet of Jesus and [said], 'I cannot rid my heart of its love of earthly possession. Help me to do so'", Wilson argues, that would have been fine. Instead, he chooses to walk away. "By implication, he denies not his ability to follow Christ, but Christ himself."

There are also many other good things in the books, as well as some bits I found confusing. The thing I was probably most grateful to discover was this passage quoted by Wilson from Jeremy Taylor who he identifies as a 17th century divine:

"Is it not enough for me to believe the words of Christ, saying, This is my body? And cannot I take it thankfully, and believe it heartily, and confess it joyfully; but I must pry into the secret and examine it by the rules of Aristotle and Porphyry and find out the nature and the indiscernible philosophy of the manner of its change and torment my own brains, and distract my heart, and torment my Brethren, and lose my charity, and hazard the loss of all the benefits intended to me, by the Holy Body; because I break those few words into more questions than the holy bread is into particles to be eaten?"

Reading 2024: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha

 On the opening page of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (a baseball reference), we meet Sam Waxworth, a "young man from the provinces" newly arrived in New York. In the book's first line he asks this question:

"What makes a life - self or circumstance?"

Perhaps in part the novel is an attempt to answer the question.

Sam is a data-cruncher who has been invited to write for an established New York magazine. The year is 2009 and Sam feels he has "an opportunity at greatness" "in a place worthy of his ambitions". He believes in aggregation - "the combination of observations" (these, please note, are purely data observations) - and he wants "to test his ideas against the world".

We watch as he uses data to find himself a flat, and presumably we are supposed to be amused that Sam thinks himself brilliant for finding somewhere available and affordable that everyone else has mysteriously overlooked. The fact that the building houses a poultry warehouse, crammed with smelly caged birds might be what has put off others less addicted to data, but Sam seems oblivious.

Strolling the city, Waxworth notices a charismatic street preacher who is forecasting the world's end on 1 November. Waxworth, who has "spent a good deal of his life thinking about forecasting" makes the preacher the focus of his first piece.

Menwhile Eddie, a young veteran recently returned from Afghanistan, son of a formerly prominent, now cancelled, columnist, also encounters the preacher, saves him when he is attacked, and moves in to his apartment to take care of him. 

Eddie's father, Frank Doyle, is to be the focus of a long Waxworth piece. Sam plans a hatchet job but over the course of a baseball game in Doyle's company finds that he likes him and ends up being caught up in the charm of Doyle family life.

Frank Doyle is quite unlike Sam, all emotion, no precision. "Not everything that happens can be saved in a database", he tells Sam. In the area of baseball, his great passion, he believes that some elements that affect a game cannot be defined in words.

Sam has a wife who is not joining him in New York immediately. The effect Frank Doyle's daughter Margo has on Sam when he meets her may be one of those things in wider life that cannot be put into statistical terms, let alone words. 

Margo has adored her father until very recently when the behaviours that got him cancelled also led to her own disillusion with him. "Her father had taught her that engaging seriously with ideas was one of life's great pleasures". Until the moment of disillusion "she has spent so much of her life wanting to impress her father that, now she no longer cares, she doesn't know what to do."

Margo and Sam fall into a habit of wandering the city talking about poetry and looking at paintings. Margo tries to explain that poems aren't riddles, that Sam can't treat them as puzzles from which to extract a solution. 

Meanwhile Margo's mother has come unstuck because of the financial crisis, which is tricky given that Frank is no longer on anyone's pay roll. Frank's fall from grace it becomes clear was precipitated by alcoholism, and as a result he is unaware of any problems outside of his pretty immediate orbit. His son Eddie becomes ever more enmeshed with his preacher friend, and his best friend from school, a gay scholarship boy who has made a enormous fortune at a hedge fund, decides to help Mrs Doyle, a decision that leads in the end to his downfall and hers. 

Sam's wife meanwhile arrives in New York and quickly realises that something is going on between Margo and Sam, (although in a way not much is as Sam, as Margo observes, is not so much in control of his passions as actually almost devoid of them). 

Everyone hurtles forward on their own trajectories toward a brilliantly plotted finale and, despite the raw ingredients that I've set out possibly sounding not wildly interesting, over 500 pages flash by enormously enjoyably and in a manner that conjures a particular time and place with great vividness.

This is not a novel that plays with form. It is that far more entertaining and infinitely trickier thing - an old-fashioned story set in a richly imagined world with a sprawl of characters, a novel that captures the mood and atmosphere of a particular moment while creating a tangle of endearing characters and plot lines. I was not bored once. The mother and the school friend were, to my mind, weak points in the structure - that is, I was not persuaded that the author saw them as characters of interest rather than pawns to be shifted about to assist plot and add the right amount of diversity - but overall this is a hugely entertaining book with a lovely elegiac ending. Few people can or do write this way any more. I am glad that Beha does.