Vicious but not very funny

In 1965, Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) began to make their weekly appearance on the BBC radio comedy show Round the Horne.  In whatever role they were inserted into the narrative, they always announced themselves with the same mincing line: "Ooh ‘ello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!"

The brilliance of the script (by Barry Took and Marty Feldman) was its ability to smuggle outrageous references past the BBC censors and into the consciousness of those who had ears to hear. When the pair turned up as lawyers, Julian said, "We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time". On another occasion, Sandy spoke of Julian’s piano-playing as “a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright".

These were subversive jokes. Private homosexual acts were still punishable by imprisonment. Most gay men had no choice but to stay in the closet. Did Julian and Sandy promote a stereotype? Of course. But a camp manner and a language of sexually charged double-entendres was the only style in which a gay identity could be made visible, or (for the radio audience) audible. Portrayals of gay life were either outrageously comic or suicidally grim. Normal was not yet an option.

Now a crack team of writers and actors are, for some reason, recycling a dismal version of the same old stuff – gay with all the gaiety knocked out of it. In Vicious, a new ITV sitcom, revered classical actors Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play a couple who have been living together for 48 years, which means they must have met the year Julian and Sandy made their first appearance. Coincidence? Probably. But if we imagine them as Julian and Sandy grown old, they’ve also grown mean. Judging from the first episode, they’ve sunk into a state of mutual loathing and are reduced to addressing each other in carping put-downs.

In this case, context is all. Julian and Sandy were a force for progress. They were part of the cultural climate that made it possible for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 to decriminalise homosexual acts in private. Who was offended by Round the Horne? Daily Mail readers, perhaps. Half a century later, I find myself harrumphing at the telly – screaming queen jokes just aren’t that amusing any more – while the Daily Mail declares the new show “an instant classic”.

I don't blame the actors. Actors have to work and must make the most of the script they're given. The writers are Mark Ravenshill, a respected playwright, and Gary Janetti, who was executive producer of Will and Grace. Both of them are gay, so I have to assume they know what they’re doing. I don’t.

Mislaid in translation

In Windows on the World, a novel by Frédérick Beigbeder (published in French in 2003 and in English translation by Frank Wynne the following year), the narrator reluctantly joins a demonstration in Paris against the Iraq war. Agonising over how the West should respond to the attack on the Twin Towers, he asks himself, ‘Am I a coward, an appeaser, an anti-Semite, a cheese-eating surrender monkey, as the American newspapers say?’

The phrase ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ originated on The Simpsons as a parody of Bush era Anti-French prejudice before it was taken up and stripped of irony by rightwing American commentators. I was startled to find it in a French novel and curious to know what it looked like in the original. Had Beigbeder translated it from Simpsonese only for Wynne to translate it back again? So I got hold of a copy. I was surprised to discover that the American phrase stood in place of a single word – pétainiste.

In cutting this reference to Marshal Pétain, who led the Vichy government and collaborated with the Nazis, and replacing it with a joke off The Simpsons, Wynne made the text more accessible, I suppose – at least in the short term, until surrender monkeys chatter off into obscurity. But he sacrificed the historical resonance of Beigbeder’s soul-searching.

I can’t help thinking that an English-language novelist attempting to capture the French experience, would be more likely to opt for Pétain. The novelist is focused on evoking the strangeness of the other place. The conscientious translator  presumably finds satisfaction in substituting the familiar. Nobody could accuse Wynne of shirking his duty. But sometimes, with translation as with other things, less is more.

Opening at random my copy of A Farewell to Arms, a novel set in First World War Italy, I find this conversation among members of the army ambulance corps about the families of deserters:

‘They are all without law to protect them. Anybody can take their property.’

‘If it wasn’t that that happens to their families, nobody would go to the attack.’

‘Yes. Alpini would. These V.E. soldiers would. Some bersaglieri.’

‘Bersaglieri have run too. Now they try to forget it.’

I’m guessing that when I first read this I had no idea who the bersaglieri were, other than a branch of the army reputed to be less courageous than the alpini, whoever they were – alpine types? So I knew quite a lot actually. Enough to follow the conversation, anyway. Hemingway might have called them the light infantry and the mountain soldiers. And I would have gained some factual information, but I would have lost some of the illusion of listening in.

The protagonist of Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim, set in 1980s Bangladesh, rescues her nephew Zaid from an oppressive Madrasa. She puts him on a boat while he talks compulsively about what he’s been taught.

Maya pleads with Zaid to eat something. He refuses, gazing through the thin bamboo netting arches over the boat, his eyes searching for the night sky. I know the Arabic alphabet, he repeats. Where is my mother? She isn’t here, Maya tells him, you know that. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem, he begins, reciting the words he has been taught. Nauzubillah hira-shahitan-ir-Raheem. A small lizard has made its way on board, and scuttles back and forth among the curved roof slats. He settles for this, chasing it with his finger.

Zaid says two things in Arabic. I quickly find a translation on the internet for the first of them. For now, the second eludes me. But the meaning isn’t so important. It’s their dramatic significance that matters – fragments of rote learning to which Zaid clings in his anxiety. And the language is part of the soundscape, which takes its place in the scene alongside the bamboo netting and the lizard and the night sky. 

Dickens and the Time Lords

I find myself thinking of a good plot as a kind of TARDIS. Partly because it’s a vehicle for time travel, but mainly because the inside is bigger than the outside. There’s no mystery about how to get in – the doorway’s staring you in the face – but it leads to something unexpectedly capacious.

Five people on a daytrip to Margate to scatter a dead friend’s ashes in the sea. That’s the neat exterior of Graham Swift’s Last Orders. You can walk all round it and take in its scope at a glance. But open the door and you get all these entangled life stories, decades of love and conflict and betrayal. Time travel is crucial in this case, but just as important is the capacity of the plot to open up and lead you in many directions without just sprawling shapelessly.

I realise this TARDIS image might have a potency for me that not everyone can relate to. I can’t say where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated, but I know that the following evening I was glued to the first ever episode of Dr Who. I think it was mainly exposition – no Daleks – but something gripped the childish imagination. Two schoolteachers follow one of their students home, a strange girl who is causing them concern, and they watch her walk onto a piece of waste ground and slip inside a police box. I remember their amazement when they followed her through the door and saw the style in which she and the Doctor were living (the white-haired William Hartnell, of course, before Who went hip).

I was hooked for a year or two. Then I probably just grew out of it. But I may have sensed that the plot was destined to be a sprawling mess because it lacked the most basic element, which is an ending. You can wander limitlessly inside, but there’s no outside to contain the journey.

I've just seen the new film of Great Expectations. I particularly enjoyed the young gentlemen Pip mingles with when he comes into his money. Those drunken dinners with the Finches of the Grove reminded me of the Bullingdon Club where I used to hang out with Dave and Boris in my student days (not actually). Dickens’ plot, necessarily stripped of peripheral material, shines through. The twists, revelations and reversals that punctuate Pip’s life provide the containing structure. What opens up inside is the whole of society from its wealthiest heirs to its most abject criminals and the secret networks of personal relationships, financial interests, and moral responsibilities that bind them together.  

Is Will Self having a laugh?

Here he is in the Guardian, talking about his novel, Umbrella, which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize:

‘For a writer who increasingly mistrusts the metaphoric – nothing, in the final analysis as much as the first impression, is like anything other than itself – when it comes to the subject of my own books, and my attitude to them, I find myself mired in similitude.’

Everything in this sentence is slightly out of focus – other than the sense of self-importance. For one thing, the end isn’t quite connected to the beginning. Maybe if you clear all the other stuff out of the way, the beginning and the end would just about hang together:

‘For a writer who mistrusts the metaphoric… I find myself mired in similitude.’

Even so, there’s something odd about that construction. Wouldn’t an ‘although’ or a ‘but’ do the job better?

Although I’m inclined to mistrust the metaphoric, I find I can’t avoid using metaphors to talk about my own writing process.

I mistrust metaphors, but when it comes to writing about my own books I seem unable to escape them. So here goes…

Part of the problem is that the opening has a third-person feel to it. It’s not the way people usually talk about themselves. But you have to wade through all the parenthetic stuff before you get to the ‘I’, which is the first thing that definitely tells you this is Self talking about Self and not some other writer talking about Self, or Self talking about some other writer. Even the first ‘my’ doesn’t clinch it, though the second ‘my’ sort of does, so the knowledge that this is a first-person statement seems to creep up on you in a creepy kind of way. A third person ending would actually follow more naturally:  

For a writer who increasingly mistrusts the metaphoric, when it comes to the subject of my own books, Smith is strangely free with metaphors, chucking them about like empty bottles at a Bullingdon Club dinner.  

That would be Self talking about some other writer. And this would be some other writer talking about Self:

For a writer who claims to mistrust the metaphoric, Will Self is strangely attracted to phrases like ‘mired in similitude’.

That muddy image, by the way, is not the metaphor he’s apologising for. He hasn’t started talking about his book yet – the subject on which he finds himself getting bogged down in metaphor. He’s still talking about the process of talking about his book. This is what happens when he really gets into it:

‘So Umbrella, like all my other novels, seems to have come about through the conjoining of one idea or preoccupation with another, until, having reached a critical mass this fissionable material exploded and so produced the blast pattern that is the text itself.’

That’s the metaphor he’s apologising for. No apology necessary, I’d say, though the claim that his writing has the force of a nuclear explosion might come better from somebody else.

Which takes me back to the argument against metaphor that’s slipped in between dashes. Is it really true that ‘nothing… is like anything other than itself’? Isn’t a carrot more like a parsnip than either is like a suitcase? And anyway, since when was metaphor about putting things together that are like each other? When did it involve looking at a carrot and seeing a parsnip? I’m not being pedantic here about the difference between metaphors and similes. I’m talking about the imaginative process that transforms my luve into a red, red rose, or life into a mortal coil to be shuffled off, or ideas into fissionable material.

Here’s Jeet Thayil, whose novel Narcopolis is also shortlisted, giving a less clamorous and more convincing account of the way elements come together to form a whole that is more than the sum of its parts:

'I recalled moments I did not know I had stored away, snatches of old Hindi film music, bits of conversation, a slant of dusty light in the late afternoon, a room in which life occurred at floor level, a face lit by an oil lamp…. I understood that the book had decided its own shape and it would be foolish to resist….'

For the complete set of articles by the six shortlisted authors see:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/12/booker-prize-shortlisted-authors-novels?newsfeed=true

Interesting writing

As an example of key stage 3 skills in narrative writing, a website called teachit.co.uk gives us this sentence: ‘He was unhappy’. In the name of making the writing ‘more interesting’ the author offers an improved version: ‘He wiped away a glistening tear as he watched her turn away and walk purposefully towards the door.’

The more I look at the improved version, the more I like the original. ‘He was unhappy’ strikes me as a sentence with some integrity. It sounds like English. It delivers a single piece of information effectively. It establishes a point of view.

As it goes through its improvement, something weird happens to the point of view. Who exactly is paying attention to the glistening of that tear? It can’t be the man, unless he’s a narcissist and there happens to be a mirror in the room. Nor the woman: she’s facing the wrong way. So from whose point of view is it significant that the tear glistens? God’s maybe. But is this really what God would find most interesting about the man at this moment of personal crisis?

There’s also something muddled about the order of events. Four things happen: he wipes away a tear; he watches the woman; she turns away; she walks towards the door. But in what order do they happen? The turning and walking are clearly sequential. But the wiping and watching seem to be concurrent with each other and co-extensive with the turning and walking. Which suggests that it’s a big tear and a small room.

The author encourages us to make similar pigs' ears of other perfectly decent sentences. ‘The wind blew hard,’ for example, and ‘The dog barked at the children.’

Why does this matter and why am I being such a pedant about it? I’ve found this very same example reproduced on two other websites purporting to provide material for children or their teachers on how to write better.

I assume that the person who wrote this sentence and the people who continue to transmit it have paid closer attention to key stage 3 national curriculum guidelines than I have. That’s the interesting part. People with control over the education of our children really do want them to write this badly.