American Nightmare: "Miller's Crossing" and the ethnic politics of gangster movies

                

              If the Hollywood western set out an American foundation myth for the first fifty years of popular cinema, then the Mafia movie took over with a darker vision for the past forty. Western heroes were all Anglo-Saxon individualists, steeped in rugged Protestant decency, striving for the rights of the ‘little man’ against supposedly uncivilised hordes of pagan aboriginals,  superstitious Catholic Mexicans, or the twisted mirror-image of themselves (outlaws, corporate-minded Easterners, corrupt sheriffs, etc.)  Francis Coppola’s The Godfather  (1972) acknowledged for the first time that not all US citizens were descended from north Europeans, that  American individualism was all about free enterprise in business, and that those two facts had created a far more complex and less innocent basis for the society in which most of his countrymen lived. The racism which had excluded Italian immigrants from the Anglo establishment gave rise to alternative social structures, based on ethnic clan loyalties; the free enterprise principle that profit should be made by whatever means could be got away with involved the bypassing and manipulation of that establishment’s rules. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra portrayed in the first two Godfather movies (Part II in 1974) is criminal and violent, but also social and, within its own terms of reference, recognisably moral. That’s what makes these a new kind of film about US social history, as well as compelling stories. Brian de Palma did the same kind of thing for the Hispanic criminal underworld with Scarface (1983), Sergio Leone for Jewish gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America (1984.)

 Jon Polito (Johnny Caspar)

                By the time the Coen Brothers made Miller’s Crossing (1990) the struggle between Italians, Jews, Anglos, Hispanics, Irish,  and, to a lesser extent, African-Americans, for  dollars and the nation’s soul (which may or may not be the same thing) was an established cinematic paradigm.  Being the Coens, though, this was never going to be a simple genre piece. On one level, the film is a blackly comic pastiche of everybody else’s gangster movie. It opens with an outraged Sicilian mobster (Johnny Caspar) decrying to an Irish gang boss (Leo O’Bannion) the dubious ethics of a renegade Jewish grifter (Bernie Birnbaum) who has shortened the odds on a fixed boxing-match, thus diminishing his gambling profits. It involves a ménage à trois between Bannion, his ‘moll’ Verna – a cynic from Central Casting and Birnbaum’s sister to boot – and his lieutenant, Tom Reagan, who gives every indication of not caring a damn about her. In the course of the action, Reagan is subjected to a series of savage beatings which in the real world would have killed or incapacitated him, sustaining no more injury than a cut lip. In several early scenes, O’Bannion is shown dictating to the Mayor and Police Chief as though they were underlings; in a later one, the now-dominant Caspar does the same thing.  There are crosses and double-crosses galore.

L-R: Albert Finney (Leo O'Bannion), Gabriel Byrne (Tom Reagan), Marcia Gay Harden (Verna Birnbaum)

So far, so parodic. But just as Coppola and Leone, inter alia, demonstrate the workings of politics and the wider mechanisms of business in the activities of organised crime, so the Coens introduce the cock-up theory of history into the mix.  Reagan, now apparently working for Johnny Caspar (keep up !) takes pity on Birnbaum, whom he has been instructed to murder, and allows him to escape on condition he leave town without trace. Whereupon he reappears in Reagan’s own apartment to manipulate the situation to his own reckless financial advantage.  The gang war prompted by his chiselling fizzles out. Caspar himself is murdered by Reagan, who also (finally) takes out Birnbaum. O’Bannion is restored, diminished, to top-dog status, with Verna agreeing to marry him but Reagan refusing his offer of re-employment. The solidarity within all camps – Sicilian, Irish and Jewish – is fatally compromised. Reagan is the last man left standing, largely because his ruthlessness, cynicism and ability to take a beating exceed those of any of the other players, but it is a moot point how long this is likely to last. He might be killed next week, or he might go on to found his own mob and be brought down years later in a replay of the kind of machinations in which he has just played a part. His bloody-mindedness and individualism, like a perverted version of that of the cowboy-heroes cited earlier, have allowed him to outwit the collectivities and corporations among which he moves, but the price is solitude and unknowability, and we're all aware they will not protect him indefinitely. He is as blank as Melville’s Samouraï, and as doomed.

John Turturro (Bernie Birnbaum)

Glossy pictures: Gary Hume - Flashback, at Leeds Art Gallery

American Tan XXVIII (2008)

 

The first draft of this review began thus:             

“In his essay Cuisine ornamentale, published in the mid-1950s and collected in his celebrated Mythologies (1957), the French cultural critic Roland Barthes decried a tendency of the magazine Elle to extend the glossiness of its own production values to the content of its cookery pages. Every week, he wrote, Elle would publish a colour photo of some elaborate dish in which ‘the predominant  substantial characteristic is the coating (le nappé): visible effort is made to glaze surfaces, to surround them, to swamp the food itself with a smooth patina of sauce, cream, fondant, or jelly… This universal glazing is, in fact, a demand that we accord its object a certain distinction, refinement, eminence… ’ 

“That word, le nappé, kept coming back to me as I prowled between the paintings and sculptures making up this small retrospective of Gary Hume’s work, wondering why, for the most part, I didn’t get it – or indeed, if there was anything to get. Perhaps it was all the gloss paint used for many of the pieces. Sheets of aluminium evenly covered in simple blocks of uniform bright colour, balloonlike bronzes sheathed in shiny black or white carapaces: this work announces its surface, its coating, as brashly as a new car’s bodywork, a glossy nailpolish, or a 1950s gastroporn photograph. But does it announce anything else ?”

Then my computer died on me, and I couldn’t do anything more on it for nearly two weeks. But I did go back to take a second look at the Gary Hume , and I couldn’t believe my eyes… Somehow, that fortnight away from first impressions, and the prejudices they had triggered, enabled me to see the work afresh. Yes, the surfaces were glossy, the materials and their combination unusual and confrontational, the colours bright and simple, but coming back to them with an idea of what I thought they looked like, I found myself completely confounded.  Instead of a uniform Barthesian nappé, I found an array of textures and variations beneath the outer sheen which was little short of astonishing. Pictures I had been prepared to dismiss as slapdash and overly simplistic, like Roots (1993) and Flying (1995), disclosed a technical effort and a subtlety of finish which simply hadn’t been apparent (to me, at least) on an initial view. 

 Four Doors I (1988-89)

Paint is layered, scraped, pooled and brushed, in a range of ways, rewarding close examination and the viewing of each piece from different distances and angles. In fact, it can probably be asserted that the glossier the surface – the greater its initial resistance to examination – the more there is to be discovered. Four Feet in the Garden (1995), ostensibly just a silhouette of, well, two pairs of human feet facing each other above stylised blades of grass, is delicately inscribed with detail of the toes and carries two mysterious whorls of relief positioned above them.  Although his paintings will sometimes use contrasting blocks of colour  for immediate effect, there is actually more going on within individual colour-areas than between them. This, of course, makes the pictures fiendishly difficult to photograph, so be warned about judging them from the illustrations accompanying this text – they really need to be seen in their original state.

Snowman (not in the Leeds show)

The same goes for the sculptures. The bronze may have been denatured by treatment with Hume’s ubiquitous gloss paint, but their surfaces are far from uniform. American Tan VII (2006-2007) is an assembly of sections of human legs, planed and curved with a solidity, presence, and isolation both familiar and poignant. Even the ‘snowman’ sculpture The End of Fun (2004) – two sets of three black-painted spheres stacked on top of each other – has an irregular, ‘made’ quality which works against its stylised premiss.  American Tan VI (2006-2007) combines a tan-painted ‘legs’ motif with what would appear to be a giant bare-bronze chrysanthemum, a touching and funny comment on the relationship between artifice and nature.

 

Water Painting (1999)

On this second visit, I took time to watch parts of the film of Gary Hume talking about his work which is played on a loop in an anteroom to the main exhibition. In it he talks about the particular qualities of the gloss-paint medium:  “There are no light-effects in my paintings” he says at one point “but the paint itself loves light.” Quite.  He is engagingly modest about his drawing ability, although on the strength of the complex, interweaving human outlines in Water Painting (1999) he has no real need to be. He is clearly a highly original craftsman and thinker about painting, and appears, remarkably, to have found a new and challenging way to skin the old artistic cat.

 Gary Hume - Flashback is at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds, until 15th April.

Bog, Droogs & Ludwig Van: Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” Revisited

Malcolm McDowell as Alex

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/

‘What’s it going to be, then, eh ?’  The phrase which recurs as a Leitmotif throughout Anthony Burgess’s 1963 novel,  surfacing once in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 screen adaptation, encapsulates what its author saw as the essential element determining whether human behaviour can be judged as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ – choice. More prosaically, it was an apposite question to ask myself as I sat down in front of this notorious movie forty years on from its original UK release: would it come over as a period-piece dependent on the assumptions of the times in which it was made, or would it continue to work on its own terms, as any piece of art must if it is to be worth revisiting  ?

The short answer is, probably, both. The film’s opening sequences of gang violence speak, of course, to continuing fears among the wider population  about young men attacking the vulnerable. Burgess’s starting-point was an assault by off-duty GIs on his wife during the Second World War blackout in London, but by the early 60s what Dick Hebdige called “respectable fears” about Teddy Boys, and later Mods and Rockers, fighting each other , the police, and polite society, had become a standard media trope. By 1971 this had modulated into tabloid-fuelled terror of that highly-visible, working-class male phenomenon, the skinhead (I can’t be sure, but I think I had a No 1 crop at the time I first saw the film.)  Kubrick’s  costume design taps cleverly into contemporary signs associated with such groups – the antihero Alex’s gang wear straight trousers, boots and braces, as did the skins; the group led by one ‘Billy-Boy’ sport vaguely Nazi-ish military insignia, then current among some bikers. In the ensuing decades it’s easy to map the same hysteria onto successive, loosely-identifiable groups of young men – ‘casuals’, punk-rockers, ‘chavs’, boys in hoodies, wearers of ‘gangsta’ uniform – banding together, as young men will, to establish hierarchies of status based largely on physical strength and aggression. Customary liberal opinion holds that any destructive behaviour emanating from such groups is a social and/or psychological problem amenable to practical solutions;  A Clockwork Orange , however, suggests it may be a moral issue more intractably arising from human nature – even, in Burgess’s lapsed-Catholic terms, Original Sin.

Anthony Burgess in the early 1960s

It has to be said that Kubrick is lighter on the religion and philosophy than Burgess, probably wisely, almost certainly because of the difficulty inherent in rendering internal monologue cinematically. Whereas Burgess’s Alex is quite explicit from the beginning about his belonging ‘in the other shop’ from ‘Bog or God’, Kubrick’s is necessarily more of a doer than a thinker. If anything, this makes the depiction of violence all the more shocking. Burgess filters his description through a  largely Russian-based argot (derived, probably, from his Cold War-era fears about the advance of Soviet influence), which has a distancing, almost comic effect. Kubrick retains the ‘nadsat’, or ‘teen’ language for much of his dialogue, but choreographs his scenes of  beatings, stabbings and rape to a soundtrack of popular classics, which serves the dual purpose of counterpointing Alex’s delight in mayhem with the supposedly ‘civilised’ pleasure he takes in serious music, and by extension implicating the audience in this confusion of  savagery and culture. One thing everyone knows about A Clockwork Orange the film is that it was blamed by the tabloid press for inspiring just about every outbreak of youth-related violence which occurred during its original run, and was thus withdrawn from distribution in the UK for some 20 years afterwards, allegedly by Kubrick himself. Ironically, then, it was co-opted by the very advocates of social engineering whose philosophy – that human nature can be altered by external intervention – it questions. Doubly ironically, Burgess, from whose pessimistic  vision of humanity it arose in the first place, found himself appointed a popular media pundit on teenage violence, despite his insistence that he knew nothing  in particular about it !

McDowell & Kubrick on set

It is said that nothing dates like the future, meaning that our views of what is to come are invariably based on present prejudices and therefore likely to seem absurdly quaint once that future actually arrives – think 1950s science-fiction movies, for example. A Clockwork Orange, 1961 novel-version, is avowedly a futuristic satire, its setting a Britain in which a kind of socialism is institutionalised in government, streets are named after early-1960s Labour Party luminaries and left-wing writers (including Kingsley Amis !), Russian words have infiltrated popular speech, and so forth.  It doesn’t, however, give much attention to domestic detail.  Kubrick, on the other hand, faced with the need to depict the future physically, chose a slightly different tack. Design is fundamental to his film, and his approach was to exaggerate existing trends in décor, clothing and architecture rather than attempting to imagine something unknown. Thus the modified skinhead- and biker-clothing already referred to. Also, his use of the brutalist Friars’ Square shopping centre in Aylesbury (built 1966) for some of the external scenes (e.g. Alex walking home at dawn across the prestressed concrete roofs of its retail units), and the California-era David Hockney-influenced interior in which Frank (the writer earlier beaten and crippled by Alex and his droogs) and his weightlifting friend Julian appear towards the end of the film. Most strikingly, the furniture in the Korova Milk Bar – the gang’s regular meeting-place and hangout – is clearly based on the now largely-forgotten work of Allen Jones: stylised, moulded plastic simulacra of exaggeratedly trim naked female bodies, sadistically twisted into table supports and, in one case, a machine which dispenses drug-spiked milk through a gravity-defying exposed breast.

Korova Milk Bar tables

 Allen Jones table

Korova Milk Bar dispenser

This inevitably raises the portrayal of sexuality in A Clockwork Orange, in both versions a wholly male affair predicated exclusively on rape. Burgess is deliberately flat in his account, allowing his reader’s assumed disgust to arise automatically. Sex is apostrophised, in Alex’s narration, as ‘the old in-out, in-out’; most of the rape-victims are almost casually described by him as no more than ten years old (he himself, we learn at the end of Part 1 of the book, is ‘not yet fifteen.’) Kubrick’s approach is more problematic. Plainly, he could neither depict the full brutality involved, nor use child actors, and yet sexual violence – indeed, the way in which his male characters regard sex as indistinguishable from violence – is an essential element  of his critique.  Again, the design – from the outrageously sexist Allen Jones-inspired tables, through the phallic masks worn by Alex & co as disguises, to the casually-placed sculpture of a giant penis with which Miriam Karlin’s unfortunate character is battered to death – is crucial to establishing the misogynistic context within which his characters operate.  But it is difficult to see what is shown of the actual assaults – specifically the artful cutting-away of a catsuit worn by Adrienne Corri prior to her character’s (unseen) rape – as anything other than titillatory, however stylised.  Not much in A Clockwork Orange is comfortable to watch, but  this additionally feels like exploitation.

 McDowell in phallic mask, Adrienne Corri in catsuit

McDowell & murder weapon...

The original poster for the film carried a strapline describing Alex as ‘a young man whose principal interests are ultra-violence, rape and Beethoven.’ Though a composer himself, Anthony Burgess  held no illusions about the morally edifying power of great music, which notion he doubtless would have seen as a piece of mechanistic reductionism akin to the penal authorities’  attempts to condition Alex against evil through aversion therapy – the ‘Ludovico Technique’ of both novel and film.  It is, of course, well-attested that many perpetrators of Second World War death-camp atrocities were apparently ‘cultured’ people with a well-developed love of music.  This is neatly folded into Alex’s story by the use of Beethoven to accompany a film of Nazi activities shown during his ‘therapy,’ which inadvertently causes him to associate the Ninth Symphony with a desire to commit suicide.  It’s worth commenting here on Walter (later Wendy) Carlos’s disorienting soundtrack to the film, a series of Moog synthesiser programmings of, inter alia, Purcell and Beethoven, combining familiarity of theme with a demonic strangeness of execution,  cleverly complementing what has been done with the visual ‘stretching’ of current design conventions into something almost hallucinatory. With or without aversion therapy, if I woke in a locked room to find Carlos’s arrangement of the Ninth bubbling and squeaking at high volume through the floorboards, I too might be tempted to throw myself through the nearest window…

A film made 40 years ago of a novel that is now 50 years old, A Clockwork Orange stands up well because of its abiding themes – violence among young men, misogyny, the eternal nature of evil, and the perennial failure of the state to rid itself of ‘antisocial behaviour’ through social and medical interventions. Kubrick elides some of the metaphysical subtlety of Burgess’s book, but creates some strong visual images as corollaries for philosophical unease. There are also many telling little details to delight the heart of the film-buff and amateur cultural historian: Alex-in-the-film (Malcolm McDowell) is given a Mancunian accent, like that originally possessed by his literary begetter, and the surname ‘Burgess’ - although confusingly he's also referred to at one point as 'Alex Delarge'. There is even a not-so-subtle piece of early product-placement in the form of the soundtrack album from Kubrick’s own 2001 – A Space Odyssey at the centre of a display in the record-shop scene !  Around the edges of the violence done both by and to Alex there gathers a coterie of memorable grotesques – a bombastic clergyman aping the hellfire priest in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Freddie Jones’s oleaginous probation officer, Alex’s bewildered parents, the crazed writer Frank (Patrick Magee) – signalling, perhaps, that what we are dealing with here is above all a very, very black comedy. In fact, the whole thing can be seen as a kind of updated Jacobean revenge play, full of horrors, gory effects and dark wit, from which no-one emerges well. Anthony Burgess would certainly have liked that. Stanley Kubrick too, probably.

Stanley Kubrick's film is now widely available on DVD, often, alas, in supermarket bargain bins; Anthony Burgess's novel, though not his best work, has remained continuously in print since its reissue in 1972, currently as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Creative Writing: Reflections of a Survivor

'Q' (Rip Torn) in Wonder Boys

 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185014/

              In Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film Wonder Boys, based on a novel by Michael Chabon, the successful author Quentin Morewood (known as ‘Q’, and played by Rip Torn), opens his keynote speech to a literary festival by announcing, portentously, “ I am… a Writer.” There is a brief pause, followed by thunderous applause from the assembled members of the university Creative Writing faculty hosting the event. As the ovation dies down, it is replaced by isolated shrieks of laughter  emanating from James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a gifted student, misfit and fantasist, who plainly has no time for the solemnity and self-regard of the occasion – and has also been smoking marijuana.  It’s a great comic moment, puncturing Q’s pomposity and calling into question the solemn presence of everybody there. We’re never quite sure if James is impressed by, or even aware of, his own talent – which has already been comprehensively rubbished by his studious peers – or whether it is all part of the continuum of deceit and self-concealment by which he keeps everyone around him at bay. But there can be no doubt that he holds the institution of which he is a member in little regard, and this only serves to emphasise the uncertainties simultaneously assailing his tutor, Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), who was appointed to his post on the strength of a single well-received novel and now cannot finish his second.  James obviously can write, but won’t – or can’t – play the game. Prof Tripp plays the game – he is both coach and referee into the bargain – but seems to have forgotten how to write spontaneously.  And here we have, in one brilliant little vignette, the whole paradox of Creative Writing education.

                I‘m thinking of this because for some reason a number of my Facebook friends have, in the last couple of days, posted various press and blog articles giving advice to writers and other artists on how to ‘up’ their performance,  concentrate on the job in hand, augment their creativity, and otherwise improve themselves and their production.  Coupled with this has been publicity surrounding the recent 40^th anniversary of the first UK Creative Writing degree course at the University of East Anglia (alumni: Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, et al.) The question this raises with  me is one I’ve often heard articulated before: does any of it work ? Indeed, given the huge disparity in personality between practitioners of the literary arts, the impenetrability of the commercial market for their output, and the unpredictability of artistic trends, can  it work ?

"Bleeding obvious !"

                I suppose a lot depends on what it is you’re trying to achieve. Much of the standard advice concerns the development of writing habits – treating what you do as though it were a day job, writing even when you don’t feel like it, accepting that writing practice complies with the old formula ‘1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’, and so on. But this strikes me as what Basil Fawlty might have described as the ‘school of the bleeding obvious’ – useful only to those with a vague idea that they might want to become a writer, as though this were some kind of supplementary accomplishment like learning to swim or cultivating gardenias. I’d guess that most of those who take any notice at all of this kind of article, or who might consider enrolling on a Creative Writing course, have already been doing these things for years and have either worked out all the basics on their own or learnt them through independent research.  For the rest, a very great deal of the other hints and tips regularly dispensed are contradictory and/or mutually exclusive – the most obvious example, familiar to all practising writers, being the incompatibility between screenwriter Robert McKee’s brilliantly-constructed comprehensive theory of storytelling and his confrère  William Goldman’s pithy dictum: “No-one knows anything.”  The journalist Robert McCrum was widely ridiculed just before Christmas when he filled his Observer column with  “Fifty things I've learned about the literary life”, apparently because he was simply reproducing a set of self-cancelling clichés about writing.  But as far as I could tell,  this was precisely the point he was trying to make.

Robert McCrum's Life in Books

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/18/fifty-literary-life-robert-mccrum

                OK, declaration of interest time. I am a writer (note lower-case ‘w’, and no pregnant pause) – or at least, I was. Not a serial success like Q, nor a talented maverick like James Leer, nor even a one-hit wonder with a great future behind him (as they say) like Grady Tripp. I was a hoverer round the fringes of the UK poetry scene,  recipient of  fairly regular little-magazine publication, a couple of minor residencies, commissions for reviews and essays on poetry, and author of a single short collection bought out by a small press. My three continuously-rewritten and -submitted novel manuscripts remain unpublished.  I have also purported to be a Creative Writing tutor,  this last earning me far more money, and probably a bigger audience, in one year than all the rest had managed in the previous ten. As I commented when the first series of Chris Douglas and Andrew Nickolds’s Radio 4 series went out, Ed Reardon – c’est moi !

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r5ck

The thing about the CW gig, which I walked into almost entirely on my own say-so, was that I had absolutely no idea how to proceed in a way that would make any sense to my students. Leaving aside the fact that my track-record was in poetry and they were principally prose-fiction writers, their main concern was how to make their work publishable and attract the requisite attention of agents and publishing-houses, something I was in absolutely no position to tell them other than by repeating what others had, ineffectually, told me.  I was quite honest about this, as my own occasional tutors and quasi-mentors had been with me. I might be able to help you write better, I said, but beyond that nothing is guaranteed. Nothing can be guaranteed. Unsurprisingly, this was not what most of them wanted to hear : one class dwindled from 35 participants at the beginning of term to 3 at the end. Yet even in areas where I believed I had some expertise – conciseness of style, handling of imagery, effective use of dialogue – I had read too many too-diverse books to expect any more than the most provisional impact. Presented with a latterday Henry James, for example, I would have savaged his prolixity. John Le Carré would have been commended for plot, advised to tone down some of his characters, and generally recommended to make his style less leaden. God alone knows what I would have made of JK Rowling.

I ought to stress that I have never had anything to do with university-level CW courses. These are probably quite different from the kind of weekly evening-class sessions that I oversaw, and certainly attract higher-calibre authors as teaching staff.  Also, I’m sure they will have changed from the early days at UEA, where, as Ian McEwan recalled in a recent radio interview, students benefited chiefly from being encouraged to read a great deal (another example, I would suggest, of the blindingly ‘bleeding obvious’) and tutorials with the late Malcolm Bradbury sometimes consisted simply in being told one was on the right track and should carry on along it. I mean absolutely no disrespect to anybody who either teaches or has studied on any CW course at any level – and  I number several friends among both groups – but I do wonder if they aren’t setting themselves an impossible task, given the ever-mutating nature of art and literature, and the fact that nobody, but nobody, claims to be able to predict what ‘the Market’ will pick up, now or in the future.

Young McEwan

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9652000/9652677.stm

Of course, as McEwan also pointed out in the same interview, the great advantage of his time at university was the opportunity to spend a substantial period legitimately concentrating on writing, reading, discussing work with other writers, and developing ideas, free from the necessities of paid labour and the multifarious other calls on one’s time which necessarily circumscribe the lives of most people, the great majority of practising writers among them. Ultimately, however, he will have had to reach the same accommodation as the rest of us with the practicalities of everyday existence. Whatever he or anybody else may have chanced to learn through the teaching or experience of others, such knowledge or ability remains under constant review, and is only any good so long as the individual is able to keep acquiring insights for him- or herself, maintaining self-confidence, and convincing those on whom publication depends that the work is worth the investment. Perhaps the grounding of a CW course can help in this, although it seems to me that there are so many variables involved that any success in this connection is likely to be more by luck – combined with native talent and blind tenacity – than by any judgment on the part of the course designers.

Of all the arts, I’d argue, writing is the most thankless. Even an indifferent painter or sculptor will end up with a picture or object that can be displayed, albeit in their own living-room. A composer will have a piece of music that can be played, by its author if by no-one else. A choreographer doesn’t even exist as such without someone willing to dance his or her steps. A writer, on the other hand, can spend years creating, refining, editing, and rewriting a book, but have only a heap of manuscript paper in a drawer to show for all that solitary effort if no-one is willing to publish it. With all the encouragement in the world, this is something no CW course, or handy list of writing hints and tips, or do’s and don’ts from people supposedly in the know, is ever likely to be able to remedy.  Nobody has a right to publication, and many literary agents are admirably clear in their submission guidelines as to what they will consider accepting  – even though they will themselves sometimes break their own rules if they come across something genuinely surprising.  The whole process is inherently unpredictable, and this isn’t helped by the lack of feedback accompanying most rejected submissions. The best anyone can hope to derive from the kind of advice generally available, be it in the form of structured academic courses or ad hoc lists, is a kind of temporary bulwark against the next disappointment, or the superstitious gambler’s hope that next time, next time it will be different.

(That looks suspiciously like my study floor... PS)

Rereading "Crime and Punishment": a personal exploration

This blog has been dominated so far by amateur art criticism, accidentally so in that two interesting exhibitions happened to come along at the same time to galleries near my home. Since nothing else is likely to open now before Christmas, here’s a change of tack.

I first read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment  in 1979, when I was barely 20. I only returned to it about a fortnight ago, with 32 years’ more life and a great many additional books behind me. I’ve often reread things which affected me when younger,  discovering in them ideas I’d been in no position to appreciate first time around, owing either to a lack of experience or the paucity of imagination that often afflicts those who have yet to find or reconcile themselves to a perspective on the world. Sometimes it’s almost as though it were an entirely different book from the one I remembered. My revisiting of  Crime and Punishment  is a good example of both types of experience. It’s not the first instance, but it’s the first I’ve thought to write about in a semi-public forum. Perhaps that, too, says something about me.

The novel I remembered was the story of the student dropout Raskolnikov, living in squalor in 19^thcentury St Petersburg, who conceives the Nietzschean idea that murder might be justified if it furthers the will and ambition of a superior man, citing what was then the near-contemporary example of Napoleon Bonaparte. To test himself he dispatches, brutally, with an axe, an elderly pawnbroker whom he despises for her avarice. There is business involving Raskolnikov’s mother and sister – decent but innocent bourgeois folk from the provinces – and a ‘tart with a heart’, the unwilling prostitute Sonya, who preaches religion at him. Raskolnikov is eventually caught out by the psychological acuity of examining attorney Porfiry Petrovitch, who plays on his guilt and extracts a confession. Raskolnikov is sent to Siberia, where he undergoes a religious epiphany and is saved. The End.

Now I suppose it’s pretty obvious that one impoverished, egotistical student living in a capital city for the first time away from his folks is going to be immediately impressed by the tale of another in the same position. A scepticism about conventional morals, and a desire for the decisive existential act are, I’d guess, pretty commonplace in such cases. Add to that the encounter with individuals from worlds he has never previously entered, and a nascent unease about the validity of his self-justifications, and  Raskolnikov – as remembered – might  well seem to any reasonably-educated, directionless young man a fairly accurate portrait of himself.  Leaving aside for a moment the greater part of the novel – say 500 pages – which unfolds between the murder and the confession, I was therefore more than a little disappointed by the apparent submission of the imprisoned hero to what I thought I was supposed to take for Divine Grace, but which at the time felt more like The Establishment. I was, after all, one of those who cheered for  Camus’s Meursault at the end of L’Étranger.

But on rereading the book, there was the small matter of those forgotten 500 pages. Crime and Punishment is, among its more obvious attributes,  a hefty 19^th century novel,  which fact brings me to my initial impetus for picking it up again. In Claire Tomalin’s recent biography of Charles Dickens I came across an anecdote of which I’d previously been unaware, that  Dostoyevsky met Dickens in 1862, expressing  to him great admiration for his work, which he claimed to have read in prison. This was an unexpected conjunction. In the 1970s Dickens was out of fashion among  younger British literary aspirants, perhaps as a result of the Leavisite Diktat of thirty or so years earlier which relegated all but Hard Times to the Second Division in FR’s League of English Novels, compounded with the rise of an international  Marxian and Structuralist criticism which contrived to ignore him almost entirely while drawing English attention to other, continental European writers.  Set against the lowlife and intrigue of pre-Revolutionary Russia, with its violence, class-politics, alcoholism and philosophy, the caricature Dickens of Pickwick, Tiny Tim and the Artful Dodger exercised little superficial attraction. To learn, therefore,  even at a remove which had enabled me to take a somewhat more rounded view of Dickens, that the Russian had regarded the English author as a master, was grounds in itself for revisiting Dostoyevsky, if nothing else to see what correspondences could possibly exist.

 Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Well, there are plenty. Between the murder (or rather, murders, since Raskolnikov also kills the pawnbroker’s entirely inoffensive sister – something else I’d forgotten) and the confession, the novel sets out a drama of contrasting and complementary ‘crimes’ perpetrated by a cast of vividly-drawn characters, all linked in some way to Raskolnikov, and whose ultimate fate or ‘punishment’ might be interpreted as unintended consequences of  his action. Certainly, they enable him to be seen, and to see himself – albeit unwillingly – in a context broader than simply that of the lone existential individual he evidently believes himself initially to be. I use the term ‘drama’ advisedly, since there is a certain staginess  about the way these characters suddenly come into Raskolnikov’s orbit and accompany him through a series of perambulations between rooms in the city, and there is almost certainly something of a ‘state of Russia’ purpose in Dostoyevsky’s crowding of them all together into such a narrow circle and compressed timescale – not unlike, for instance, the Dickens of Little Dorrit.  The dramatis personae  are perhaps not so overdrawn as some of Dickens’s memorable figures, and with the exception of Porfiry Petrovitch  do not repeat themselves quite so often in order to make sure the reader is absolutely clear where they stand, but there’s a flamboyance of utterance if not of physical description that renders them so brightly that I’m astonished I retained so little of them, even over three decades. One sees and recalls what one wants to see and recall, I suppose – or what one can, given one’s own resources.  For the most part, these are remarkably sophisticated psychological portraits, but perhaps it isn’t really surprising that a twentysomething  middle-class boy with pretensions to intellect couldn’t immediately appreciate that. Raskolnikov doesn’t.

Thus Marmeladov, the civil servant who has drunk away his prospects, effectively abandoned his family, and is encountered railing against himself in a grog-shop, swearing abstinence and reform should he be given a chance, then slipping right back into drunkenness as soon as that happens, might well appear a grotesque, an unbelievably stupid and unprincipled man, if he were not the exact type of every alcoholic I’ve ever encountered since I learned anything about alcoholism. He’s an addict, a sick man who knows he is sick but has no conception of a cure, and who sees all too clearly the end that awaits him – a senseless, booze-related death that will leave those who love him hopeless as well as destitute. There is nothing he nor anybody else can do to help him. Raskolnikov tries – this before the murders, even while he is still toying with his Napoleonic fantasies – but his act of kindness in giving Marmeladov what little money he has only leads to a further binge, leading ultimately to his squalid demise. Raskolnikov’s subsequent additional generosity to his widow, Katerina Ivanovna, has still further, unforeseeably disastrous consequences.

The vain Luzhin, a wealthy middle-aged man who is introduced as the fiancé-of-convenience of Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, believes he can buy gratitude and affection from those less well-off than himself. But we are allowed to see the insecurity that motivates his attempts to manipulate others into compliance with his wishes, so again a figure who might well have been presented as a caricature of wickedness is permitted a psychological depth beyond his actions. He has already betrayed himself with his statement that he would prefer to have a socially ‘inferior’ wife who is totally dependent on him, and the repulsion this engenders in Raskolnikov, and the righteous indignation this latter evinces, even while he is increasingly aware of his own criminality, forces Luzhin into a corner from which he unsuccessfully contrives to escape by cynically attempting to frame the hapless Sonya for theft. Exposed, Luzhin flees, but the only consequence of his trying to inflict lifelong torment on his victims to satisfy his own vanity is a brief humiliation before a group of people with whom he need have no further dealings. There is certainly a moral crime, but no real punishment.

Svidrigailov, Dunya’s would-be seducer, is a monster. I don’t think I really appreciated  this when I first read the novel, but he is clearly, in contemporary terms,  a rapist and paedophile. How much such terms would have been distinguished from the stock categories of ‘libertine’ or ‘rake’ at the time of Dostoyevsky’s writing is perhaps a moot point, and working originally with a somewhat stylised template for the conventions of the 19^th century novel I cannot honestly say I noticed, but he shares what is now a well-established pathology among such people in confidently blaming his victims for ‘inciting’ his crimes against them. The nightmares which attend his last night before he shoots himself make explicit a kind of  self-awareness.  The twin catalysts for his suicidal despair are Raskolnikov’s refusal to be blackmailed by him (Svidrigailov has overheard his confession to Sonya), and Dunya’s resistance to attempted rape, their combined effect being to expose to him his own moral bankruptcy.  News of his suicide is then the final ‘push’ which impels Raskolnikov to admit his own crimes to the police. Thus once more there is a complex play of cause and effect, and the generation of one kind of good from what might equally be seen either as a good or an evil event. We are certainly given no authorial help as to how these incidents are intended to be interpreted, and there is no  sudden epiphany either for Raskolnikov or for the reader.

As with Dickens, the women characters are less well-realised than the men: they are either mad, or quite exaggeratedly virtuous. Katerina Ivanovna is already unhinged by her husband’s fecklessness, and becomes completely deranged following his death and her family’s eviction from their lodgings;  Raskolnikov’s mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, begins as an innocent abroad and sinks into a vague insanity following his conviction; even the jointly-murdered pawnbroker’s sister, Lizaveta, is described as having been ‘simple-minded.’  It is true that Dunya has enough about her to train a gun on her assailant Svidrigailov, but she cannot bring herself to shoot him, while Sonya, driven to prostitution in order to support her abandoned family, takes refuge in a passive religious faith.

There is, therefore, a lot going on in my ‘forgotten’ main bulk of the novel. And yet, if one concentrates on Raskolnikov’s internal dilemma, as I did all those years ago, it is just about explicable that this whole block of narrative might be set aside as secondary to his existential  plight. For all the examples of human turpitude, self-deception, sin, guilt and exposure with which he comes into contact, none of these directly affects his attitude to his own crime nor, apparently, his decision to turn himself in. Porfiry Petrovitch has rumbled him, and quietly pointed out that his only options appear to be suicide or submission to the law. He has also raised some interesting points, arising out of the housepainter Nikolay’s false confession to the murders, about a fanatical streak in the Russian character which makes individuals want to suffer, perhaps in imitation of Christ. This is, of course, another self-deception, but it is both counterpointed and emphasised by the way in which the arch-sufferer and potential religious fanatic, Sonya, pursues Raskolnikov to the police station, like some kind of Hound of Heaven,  to ensure that he comes clean. Raskolnikov himself does not really know why he has confessed. He has called the dead pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, a ‘louse’ until the very end; he has contemplated escaping to America; he himself has no religious scruples, and his (pseudo-)philosophy of ‘permissible’ crime does not appear to have been confounded in his own estimation. Perhaps he simply should have considered the fate of his hero, Napoleon, and contemplated what happened to him when he took on Russia…

But this is not quite the final word. Various mitigating factors are discovered at Raskolnikov’s trial (introduced rather too conveniently, in my view) which leads to a relatively short sentence of penal servitude in Siberia (à propos, was there not a death penalty for murder in Russia in those days ?)  Sonya, of course, follows him there. Raskolnikov does undergo some kind of change while in prison, but I was wrong in assuming that this is necessarily a religious conversion. He appears finally to have fallen in love with Sonya, and this may involve also a spiritual dimension, or lay the ground for such, but Dostoyevsky is emphatically unforthcoming about this. Raskolnikov’s story remains ambiguous to the very last.

So what do I learn from all this ? FR Leavis, whom I cited above, was a prominent scholar and critic who believed that great novels have ‘moral seriousness’ and should be capable of changing their readers.  Crime and Punishment is undoubtedly a morally serious work, and I hope I’ve demonstrated that it had a significant effect on me as a youth; but the effect it has had on a second reading in middle-age has been quite different. Then, it was the relationship of the solipsistic individual to the world and its moral codes and conventions which struck me as important; this time it has been an exploration of the ways different people fill their lives with self-deceptions, contradictory codes of conduct, opportunism and manufactured meanings as bulwarks against the unknowability of our ends. If I’m spared to read it again in old age, I will probably derive something still more from it, appropriate to the state of knowledge and - I hope - wisdom I will have reached. Leavis was partially right: great books change us, but we also change them as we bring our own experience and ability to make distinctions to bear on them.

 Which brings me to a concluding conundrum. Unless a book is worth rereading, it probably isn’t worth reading once. Discuss. 

In 1979 I read the Penguin Classics edition of "Crime and Punishment" (1979; translator: David Magarshack.) In 2011 it was the Golgotha Press "Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky"  for Amazon Kindle (2010; translator not listed.)

Monumental presence: Clare Woods, “The Unquiet Head,” at the Hepworth, Wakefield

The Balance (detail)

Clare Woods has been busy this year. Even if the 14 paintings in her current Hepworth exhibition, “The Unquiet Head”, represent her entire 2011 output, then it’s a major achievement. Apart from anything else, five of them are enormous.  The title, a play on the way the massive eroded heads of her subject, Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, seem to exert  a mythic influence on the questing human mind, recurs and echoes throughout, underlined by punning titles for the individual pictures. The mass and mystery with which she deals are clearly incarnated in her unusual choice of media, oil and enamel on aluminium panels.

 Brimham Rocks

                Being at the Hepworth, the exhibition aims to bring out the sculptural angle in Woods’s work.  Making imaginative use of small pieces by Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Barbara Hepworth herself, the gallery  provides an introductory group of precedents and inspirations in a vestibule to the first room – an instructive and helpful device. Thus Piper’s “Cascade Through Tunnel, Hafod” finds its echo in Woods’s “Hollow Face”; Sutherland’s semi-abstract “Devastation 1941, City: Fallen Lift Shaft” is further abstracted in “Funnelled Hole.”  Hepworth’s “Rock Face” is self-explanatory as a preface to the mythico-geological preoccupations of the five giant Woods works to come in the second and third rooms.

 Funnelled Hole

The smaller paintings in the first room serve as a low-key introduction to some of Woods’s techniques. Two trios, “The Balance” and “Idle Idols I-III,” portray human heads as dense masks, two-dimensional but for the solidifying contrasts of bright – in some cases fluorescent – foreground colour against sombre, blended backgrounds. The former  is a triptych demonstrating, literally, an ‘unquiet head’, moods playing across it from panel to panel. The second is more in the nature of three variations on an uneasily jokey theme. The ‘unnatural’ palette, combined with rough lines, flamboyant detail, and the flat, shiny way in which the oil pigment lies on metal,  denature the ostensible figurative content of their subject.

 The Bloody Kernel

Two rooms lead off either side of the first. In one, three wall-height studies of aspects of the Brimham Rocks are each built up from an interlocking series of painted panels. “The Bloody Kernel” is a monumental presence hinting at a double-faced Janus-head rising away from the viewer. Horizontal strokes of colour against its black body  create a complex show of abstract detail out of the implied striations of eroded rock.  Slight disjunctures between the painting of constituent panels produce a collage effect, in turn hinting at a Cubist shift in perspective and angle of vision.  “Hopes, Noes” splits another monolith with a volcanic eruption of vivid broad brushwork, rendering the main form uneasy on its dark plinth, the controlled use of tones balancing the conventional solidity of rock against  the dynamism of the acts of seeing and painting. “Tragic Head” is a group of forms suggestive once more of human heads, one brooding presence dominant, the whole assembled from the most disjointed collage of not-quite-lined-up panels in this group, unity achieved by a tension between the movement of each and the complex detail around the base.

Hopes, Noes

Mistaken Point (detail)

The exhibition’s centrepiece is probably the two 10.5m-long panoramas, each assembled from six square panels. “Mistaken Point” and “The Intended” are companion-pieces giving sweeping views of the subject rock-formation – the former closer in, the latter more detached,  the wordplay in their titles implying different ways of understanding based on proximity and position. The pieces’ respective dominant colours are both contrasting and complementary. “The Intended” reprises and expands the monolithic head-motif in some of the pieces already discussed, while “Mistaken Point” reproduces, poignantly, what appears to be an isolated, possibly misspelt graffito inscribed in the rock and almost certainly having outlived its author: ‘ADREW 1923.’ It is perhaps this kind of telling detail which, accentuating and highlighting the huge, vague, major forms, gives the work in this show its vividness, humanity and power.

The Intended

“The Unquiet Head” is at the Hepworth, Gallery Walk, Wakefield until 29^th January 2012.