The TLS blog

The morning after The Last Cigarette

Every smoker in the street has looked a little different today. I'm thinking particularly of the ones gathered in troika knots outside the ITN building next to us at TLS Towers, the smoking media-types, the TV presenter, the media mogul, the writer, each tipping ash on to the pavement at an arms length from their polished shoes.

It's a familiar London  scene, and not exactly like the one I watched last night a mile or so away at the Trafalgar Studios. Then, there were three smokers to watch who were actors, who  wore identical clothes and who were playing the same character, the late playwright Simon Gray. This morning the groups of street-smokers are groups of different characters, wearing clothes that are only almost identical.

United as smokers, the furtive ITN folk seem, however, much more like the same person than they normally do when I pass by. Something has definitely changed. The Last Cigarette, which stars Felicity Kendal as Gray's feminine side, Jasper Britton as Gray the philosopher and Nicholas Le Prevost  as Gray the literary anarchic, is no ordinary show. It is a mind-bending piece of theatre.

Smoking is not the sole subject of this play, an artfully divided and wide-ranging monologue, adapted from Gray's memoir The Smoking Diaries and directed by Richard Eyre in front of three identical desks and piles of  papers.

At the opening, Gray and his wife are afraid of muggers and fail to answer the door to Antonia Fraser when she drops by unannounced to ask them for an impromptu supper with Harold Pinter.

The grave of a brother gets various visits.

The affairs of a philandering father get various revisits.

But a cigarette arrives with metronomic regularity -  a suck, a mother's teat, a just-lit proof of adultery - measuring out each remembered highlight and lowlight of a dying man's life.

'Chain-smoking' gets a new and sharper sense. Theatre can sometimes do that - rearranging a commonplace into a different dramatic shape, one that does not go away. 

Early in the First Act comes the news that Pinter has cancer: "And now a word from our sponsor', says Kendal: 'Simon Gray smokes Silk Cut. He is now smoking a Silk Cut. He is not feeling bilious. He has not just coughed. He is by no means on the verge of throwing up' ".

The Second Act follows the journey of the three Grays through the doctor's surgeries to discover their own cancer.

An 'opportunistic finding' in a routine medical becomes 'a grinning man holding a knife', an assassin crouched 'in a corner of the room that you've never seen illuminated before'.

In the hospital waiting rooms, where couples with holes in their throats clutch each at their own lighter, 'I wanted a cigarette so badly it was hurting'.

A bluff Welsh surgeon and a chipmunk-cheeked physician weigh out Gray's prognoses by the month - while the author regrets 'the hundreds and hundreds or thousands of cigarettes that I never experienced, inhaled and exhaled without noticing'.

Not every link in the chain of a chain-smoker is the same, the characters muse. There are 'context smokes' - 'after a swim, after a meal, after a fuck' - but better still are those not connected to an event 'the smokes of childhood which carried with them, most of all, the whiff of the smoking experiences to come'.

The Last Cigarette was written by Gray himself, his last work for the theatre before he died last August, and by his friend the dramatist, Hugh Whitemore. A mind-bender (and, maybe for some, even a mind-changer), it is acted and directed with devastating art.

Tim Griggs in other tongues

 

A friend's consolation to Tim Griggs for his first novel's huge success in the rest of Europe and its only very moderate sales in the UK continues to be quoted back at me.

'Your book  must have lost something in the original', said the friend - in words which have inspired many a translator whose work has so long seemed unappreciated.

Did Griggs's Redemption Blues have a unique 'European sensibility' which the Brits sadly missed? Or did the translations make it somehow a better book in German?

Who knows?

We will see what happens to his gripping new thriller, The Warning Bell, which, as a result of the strange experience of the old one, is published under the translated name of Tom Macaulay.

Meanwhile the translator of Dante's Rime, which I wrote about nine weeks ago around Valentine's day, has sent me his own Epitaph for a Translator.

"The poor translator here interred

Awaits his own translation

To Heaven by the Eternal Word,

Or some approximation."

Anthony Mortimer is professor emeritus at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has published verse translations of Petrarch (2002) and  Michelangelo (2007) with Penguin Classics. The "Rime" of Dante (with J. G. Nichols) is published by Oneworld Classics.

If the successful translator of Tim Griggs is out there, perhaps he or she could send a poem too.

Blair's Party for Jack Jones

 

The last time I saw Jack Jones, who died today,  was at the strangest of birthday parties during the Iraq War.

This was one of many Downing Street events at that time which had been arranged before the war began and no one had had the heart to cancel.

Tony Blair had long been sponsored as an MP by the trades union through which Jack Jones was once the most powerful man in Britain. But he kept his T and G card in the same way that a student  might wear his old father's military medals - with a jovial irony.

One of the Prime Minister's most used expressions at that time was a sharp stare, like Princess Margaret's or Princess Anne's,  at any colleague who had made one joke too far at their beleaguered boss's expense.

This was the end of my diary entry for 31 March, 2003.

"At 6 p.m. Tony Blair welcomes to Downing Street a ninety-year-old man whose legacy to the Labour Party he has spent much of his recent life dismantling.  Today is the birthday of Jack Jones of the T & G, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the days when that job was one of the most powerful in the country.  As the Prime Minister says when meeting him outside the StateDining Room. ‘You owned this place once’.

            Across the floor are the once-familiar features of other trade union ghosts, some bronzed now, their faces a bit more leathery, retired men who might play a mean round of golf in the Algarve, still recognisable as the ‘barons’ who once brought British factories to strike after strike and always seemed proud of it.  To invite them into Number Ten again is like asking the Bad Fairies back for another feast.  If it seems like that to Tony Blair, he disguises it well.

            ‘Yes, you owned this place once.  It’s not quite like that now.  But it’s very good to see you here.’

            He makes a short speech in which he pulls together every possible belief that he and his birthday guest have in common – compassion, social justice, concern for old people and children – and avoids most of the matters that divide them – new rights for union members to control their leaders, no rights for union leaders to control the government.  This is the classic consensual Tony Blairin action.

            He plays his role so neatly that the Minister responsible for the unions, Ian McCartney, standing brightly beside him, is moved to make a roll-call of all the senior Labour figures of today, including  the Prime Minister, who are Members of Parliament sponsored by the T & G.  At the end of this long list of names he draws himself up to his full, not very great, height and says: ‘If you really look at it, we’re a T & G government.’

            Only at that point does Tony Blair call a halt to the pretence.  ‘I don’t think that we can go quite that far,’ he says firmly, giving 'Little Labour’, the nickname by which McCartney introduces himself, the full ‘Straw-Campbell-that’s-enough-now’ stare.

            Jack Jones thanks his host with the words ‘I love thee for all thy faults,’ and the party goes on.

            Most of the trade union leaders of today are here too.  Virtually all are against the war.  No one mentions it.  It is like being in Fawlty Towers hotel when the Germans arrive.  ‘We may have been difficult, but we were disciplined,’ is the closest to a comment on the subject.  ‘And we’re still disciplined.’

            Cherie Blair arrives with Leo in her arms.  The old men of the trade union movement are not as charmed by him as he has come to expect.  His nanny is not far behind, and, in different arms, he soon leaves.

            The Prime Minister’s wife conducts a tour of the Number Ten silver collection.  The Bad Fairies take a keen interest.

            The veteran Labour ex-Chancellor, Lord Healey, arrives.  He has argued vigorously over the past few weeks that no benefit from bringing down Sadam Hussein can compensate for the damage done to Britain’s influence in the Arab world.  But he makes no fuss here.  He says he may make a few points later.

            A grand ninetieth birthday dinner is to take place next, paid for by a television company.  By then Tony Blair will have long gone."

Greed, religious intolerance, misunderstood enemies: How Rome Fell

A number of new books on late antiquity will be considered by the distinguished Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, in a future issue of the TLS. How Rome Fell is the title of one of the most straightforward of them - and likely to be the most popular in an increasingly contentious academic field. This is what I thought of it - from this morning's Wall Street Journal.

 

The fall of the Roman Empire has never been a cheerful subject for those with empires of their own. Imperialists who in later centuries wished to dominate large areas of the globe argued sometimes that the first millennium was irrelevant to their times, sometimes that the collapse of the greatest ancient power came from causes wholly absent in their modern empires and sometimes that the Roman fall did offer parallels -- but only for the imperialist regimes of other people. That an imperial machine as massive as Rome's might, for no clear reasons, cease to function has long brought varying degrees of disquiet and does so still.

Adrian Goldsworthy's "How Rome Fell" begins and ends with reflections on Edward Gibbon, whose classic work of the 1770s and 1780s, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," set a standard for all successors. Mr. Goldsworthy sees Gibbon as instinctively relating imperial Rome to imperial London and growing ever more pessimistic as the years swept by. When the first volume of "The Decline and Fall" appeared in 1776, the prospect of Britain keeping its American colonies seemed bright. By the time of the second and third volumes, in 1781, Britain's trans-Atlantic empire was trundling shakily toward Yorktown. In 1788, Americans were able to read the final three volumes in a new country. The tone of the great British historian, Mr. Goldsworthy says, took a noticeable change during this time.

His own tone toward Britain -- Mr. Goldsworthy is himself British -- moves equally toward depression. He notes that, like the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, his country has had a growing share of incompetence, corruption and blatant deceitfulness. It, too, has seen the number and the power of military bureaucrats rise while the number of soldiers has fallen. This sort of comparison, seemingly inevitable for its subject, emerges from various passages in "How Rome Fell" but does intrude directly upon Mr. Goldsworthy's story. Like Gibbon himself, whose sense of living with two declining empires comes less from his history than from his letters, Mr. Goldsworthy is eager to give primacy to his narrative. He covers a shorter time period than Gibbon but tells us clearly and well -- and without attempts at literary majesty -- about the series of events that brought Rome's western empire to a state of collapse.

There were mad, bad emperors, of course, campaigns lost against Persians, Germans and Gauls, and the imposition of Christianity in extreme and intolerant forms. There was the Persian capture and life-imprisonment of Emperor Valerian in 260. Those looking for decisive battles often choose Adrianople in 378, when the Goths killed Emperor Valens and some 10,000 of his men on what is now the Greco-Turkish border. The fifth-century emperors, a succession of generals, children and chancers, showed flexibility but little foresight.

Although Britain's decline is much on Mr. Goldsworthy's mind, the U.S. is the main focus of his practical historiography. Predominantly a military historian, he has enjoyed the attention of Washington policy makers eager to learn about the similarities between then and now -- overstretched forces, domestic greed, declining shared values, determined foreign foes. It is "an odd sensation," he says, "for an historian to talk to an audience that is actually listening to what you are saying." In universities it is more common for the members of a seminar to be thinking about their own contribution in reply. Americans, he discovers, are also more likely to have taken a general classics course and to have some knowledge, at least in outline, of the time between Julius Caesar and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

How exactly did the Roman Empire fall? One sure answer is "slowly." It did not collapse like the 20th- century empires of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Another answer is "violently." It was long a useful orthodoxy for the founders of the European Union that their continent had developed inevitably, almost gently, from a Roman Empire to the first Franco-German axis. But some excellent books for general readers in the past few years, notably Brian Ward- Perkins's "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" (2005), have shown how devastating was the economic and human cost paid between 450 and 900. It is still unfashionable to speak of the Dark Ages (there was continuing cultural life), but these were certainly the Poor Ages, in which protection for the weak and vulnerable, from roaming killers and even from the weather, was much more precarious than it had been under Roman rule.

When did the fall begin? Mr. Goldsworthy gives a vivid account of one the periods most often cited, the four years following 192 A.D., when Rome tottered under the weight of its responsibilities and the weakness of its leaders. He focuses on the murders of Commodus (the first emperor to be born the natural heir to a reigning father) and then of his chaotic successors, Pertinax (whose father was a freed slave) and Julianus (who bought the office at auction). After them came the African, Septimius Severus, who has attracted recent attention as Rome's "first black emperor," although Mr. Goldsworthy follows the line that he may have been merely a bit dark-skinned. Anyway, he is judged to have shown no thinking that was different from that of his benighted predecessors.

While Severus gains the Goldsworthy status of "a good emperor" who, unusually for his time, died a natural death, his heirs took on the mantles of mania and madness. Frightened emperors felt increasingly insecure in Rome: The need for them to be on permanent military maneuvers matched their personal preference to be out of town. The power and idea of Rome moved east -- where Gibbon followed it. The year 476, when the diminutively named Romulus Augustulus was deposed, became a conventional date for later writers of Rome's power ending in the West. But few probably noticed much difference at the time. Gibbon finished his task in surprise that the Roman Empire had lasted so long. Mr. Goldsworthy concludes that empires are no more immune from human stupidity than anything else.

Ballard's Hello to America

A melancholy look along the bookshelves on the night that J.G. Ballard has died.

A red Cape proof copy of Hello America comes first. That's the 1981 novel which  begins when the United States is not merely a former super-power but a country almost totally forgotten by the rest of the world.

Sand blows through the White House. There are cactuses on Capitol Hill. A century after General Motors went bankrupt, the most desirable means of travel are camels descended from ancestors in San Diego Zoo.

A brave band returns to America see what all the fuss was once about.

It isn't the best Ballard, hardly more than a yarn in many ways. Crash and Empire of the Sun (first published in The Times in 1984 and generating a a red-inked note of thanks, in a blue Gollancz proof, from the grateful, and always very gracious, author) are among many better books.

I have a yearning for Cocaine Nights too, a nastier piece of work in a white Flamingo copy  wrapped in soft silver foil.

But man-made climate change was almost a wild conceit in 1981. So was the bankruptcy of General Motors. I want to remember what else was there in Hello America.

My personal tribute to Jim Ballard's passing will be to spend the rest of this night reading it again.

Read The Warning Bell before the Germans

Only occasionally does someone give me a line in the morning that I'm still pondering at 10 pm.

My old friend Tim Griggs came to see me earlier today - or Tom Macaulay, as he is now known, as a result of business discussions with British publishers which he told me about but I still don't quite understand.

His first novel, Redemption Blues, sold around one million copies - almost all of them in German and other European translations.

He became a successful English thriller-writer whose work has not been successful in English.

A few years ago a consoling friend  said to him: 'your novel must have lost something in the original'.

That is the line - a good line -  that I am still pondering now.

I'm sure there must be other English novelists whose work was only appreciated at home after translation and triumph in Germany. But at 10 pm I cannot immediately think of one.

I first met Tim (or Tom) when we shared an office at Shell UK in the mid nineteeen seventies. Also with us in the same room was an obsessive Southend book-collector, a beautiful woman pursued by elderly writers, a designer who could not  afford his Ferrari and only one man who was ever likely to have had a career in Shell.

Tim (or Tom) and I both looked back this morning and hoped that, after we had left Big Oil,  Rodney had enjoyed the career that he deserved.

Ther are obvious publishing problems in being a massive best seller insufficiently beloved in one's own country. But Tom (Tim) seems to have circumvented them.

'Whatever happened to Tim Griggs?', asks a fan on the Amazon site.

Well, he's here. I have seen him.

I have spent the first part of this evening with his gripping new book, The Warning Bell. When I've finished this post - I'm going back to it.

It will be out in the British shops in June.

Don't let the Germans get there first - again.

Dead heads and humanists

In view of the continuing argument about the 'humanist' arguments of Thomas Churchyard, whether I used the word correctly, and whether a blog is merely 'random jottings' I offer the following quotations from the book with which I began.

Churchyard, for newcomers, was an Elizabethan critic, soldier, journalist and general chancer in life who described the English tactic of lining paths with Irish severed heads in order to terrorise the rebels of Munster.

He defended the actions of Sir Humphrey Gilbert with what the distinguished editors of Edmund Spenser's Selected Letters describe as 'a humanist apology on ethical grounds', arguing that since the dead Irishmen suffered no further harm from the use of their heads the tactic was ethically sound.

This justification is 'humanist' because it relies on rationalistic arguments from classical Greece, in Churchyard's case, those of Diogenes, a philosopher happy that dogs, or anything else,  might eat his body when he was dead. What was it to him who ate or passed by his corpse?

As the Oxford editors continue, 'Churchyard deliberately and elaborately expends his humanist learning not in defence of Gilbert's crime against the living - surely the nub of his cruelty - but rather in defence of his supposed crimes against the dead'.

Churchyard was not a particularly noble human being. Consult Wikipedia for an account of his varied sins. But that did not bar him from using and abusing humanist philosophy.

As the editors of the new Spenser papers continue, 'Churchyard's representation of Gibert's policies may seem extreme, but similar kinds of humanist arguments were adduced to explain and apologise for similar kinds of events - on the English side - throughout Spenser's period in Ireland'. They go on to list them.

The aim of my original blog, like many others here, was to draw attention to some interesting pages in a new book. Since blogs are, indeed, 'random jottings' of a kind, I began by recalling that my first encounter with this issue came in a discussion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness some years ago with an Irish friend.

I am still not sure why this should have puzzled the academic and author, Margarita Stocker. There was no more 'point' in my blog than to draw readers' attention to a book that for one reason or another had caught my attention.

To repeat: Selected Letters and Other Papers by Edmund Spenser, edited by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, published by Oxford University Press, priced rather fiercely at £125.

Love a Druid, Hate a Papist

For those opposed to the Papacy, any enemy of Rome might become a friend.

Take, for example, the Druids of ancient Britain, some of ancient Rome's most vividly imagined foes, savant savages, human sacrificers, wild men surrounded by naked women who lived and worked beneath bloodstained trees.

Whether any Roman writer had ever actually seen a Druid, let alone visited their hideous groves, is a matter of much doubt. But when seventeenth century opponents of an English Catholic kingdom wanted to link themselves to the most flamboyant freedom fighters in their past, the English Druids, as fearsomely described by Caesar, Tacitus and Lucan, were friends indeed.

Ideally, of course, classical Druids needed a little cleaning up if they were to become the most repectable possible ancestors of Protestants fighting Stuart despotism.

More medicine perhaps - and fewer massacres.

More contemplation of the spirit - less burning of babies in human-shaped wooden baskets.

A solid political role as representatives of the English people - one that that predated any idea of kingship coming from Rome.

Enter John Selden, 'one of the most learned men of his time' as he is conventionally known.

That kind of title is always domething of a curse - like 'finest mind of his generation' and other paths to doom.

Certainly, Selden's reputation for refined historical and legal scholarship, is not best represented on the Druid  issue.

This paragon of Latin, Greek and Hebrew learning - MP and propagandist for parliament - produced 'one of the most blatant apologies for the ancient Druids ever published in early modern Britain', says the historian Ronald Hutton in a new book that will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS.

Selden's Druids were the wisest, gentlest and far-sighted of folk, sharing the calmest philosophical beliefs with Pythagoras, the Cabbala and other  systems that predated the upstart Romans.

They were English spiritual beings.

They were the most Christian pagans to have ever lived - and, if they sometimes dressed up to terrify the Caesars, that was wholly to their credit, indeed to the credit of any decent Englishman.

Two sturdy volumes have recently arrived from Oxford, setting out under greater scrutiny Selden's compendious life and work.

The Druidic defence in Selden's Analecta Anglobritannica is designated by G.J.Toomer of Brown University as 'clever rather than convincing. . . . . .with many juvenile characteristics. . and a jauntily defiant attitude towards the criticism he expects'.

John Milton later began his own consideration of the subject by following Selden quite closely. His first Druids were fellow poet sages who had brought their good English wisdom to Pythagoras and the Persian Magi.

But then he read some Caesar and Tacitus for himself - and began to take a different view of such an immoral crew, 'a barbarous and lunatic rout'.

Hutton's book has only just arrived on my desk but it seems unlikely that Protestants and parliamentarians will be the only culprits.

He will show. I think, how Druids were invented and reinvented for various purposes from the very moment their name appeared in print.

 

Severed heads all in a row

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was the half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh, less glamorous and, in most places, lesser known.

Ireland is perhaps the one place where the name of Sir Humphrey still comes with a chill, famed as he was there for decapitating the corpses of rebels against Queen Elizabeth's rule and laying the heads like kerbstones along the path to his tent.

He liked a double row  along  the path by which Munster men  seeking English clemency were forced to tread.

The eyes and ears of their fellows would encourage a suitably compliant attitude, in Gibert's view.

Itwas a Dubliner friend who first told me this story. We were talking about Joseph Conrad at the time.

Three hundred years after Gilbert's exploits the Irish patriot, Sir Roger Casement, played his part in the inspiration of Heart of Darkness by exposing similar tactics in the Belgian Congo.

Casement, my friend said, maybe recognised the horror of the skulls more readily  than did travellers from other nations.

Only just now, have I taken the trouble to read the original account of Gilbert's path of heads - from Thomas Churchyard's A General Rehearsal of Warres (1579), cited in a new Oxford edition of Edmund Spenser's letters .

What is striking is not the terror tactic itself but what the editors describe as 'the humanist apology on ethical grounds' by which it was justified.

This was  the observation that the dead suffered no more by the decapitation ("the dedde felte no paines by cuttynge of their heddes") and that, following the view of Diogenes the Greek  philosopher, their bodies might just as well be laid out 'ad terrorem' or eaten by dogs on a dunghill as decompose in any other way.

Thus is humanist learning deployed not in defence of Gilbert's crime against the living but of his non-crime against the dead.

And very strikingly.

The author of The Fairie Queene, who served as a bureaucrat and private secretary in sixteenth century Ireland, included frequent beheadings, dismemberments and slaughters in Books V and VI of his poem - 'a clear residue of Spenser's experience', say the editors.

That seems right enough - even if it is not as as commonly discussed a literary memorial to horror as the one  left  three centuries later.