The Search

 

Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of reviewing this novel we need a short history lesson:

Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just north-west of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. - Wikipedia

There is so much history attached to Word War II that I couldn't tell you if I knew that or not. I sat and watch the whole World at War series with my dad back in 1973 so I must have heard about it. The fact is after a while the war just blurs into five years of wall-to-wall horror stories and atrocities with the odd act of heroism thrown in for good measure and it's hard to get emotional about it any more. At least 50 million people died in that war and since then we've heard many stories of entire villages being massacred in Africa and Cambodia, for example.

We have our own tragedies to mourn. Do we really need another book about World War II?

I had my doubts when I started to read this, not the author's fault I have to stress, but mine. I read the scene where the village's men are executed without batting an eye. Even the fact that the only witness is Jan (a ten-year-old boy) and one of the men is his father still left me dry-eyed. Then he returns home only to be captured by the Nazis where he sees his mother and elder sister rounded up with all the other women and shipped off to God knows where. This leaves him in charge of his little four-year-old sister, Lena.

It's hard to keep close to her though. Eventually they wind up in a children's home in Germany.

It isn't often he gets a chance to speak to Lena, for the girls and boys are kept apart most of the time. Weeks pass before he manages to find a moment when she is alone; when he tries to speak to her, he thinks she's changed. For one thing, she speaks German. When Jan talks to her in Czech, she screws up her face and tells him to speak properly.

"Only peasants speak the way you do."

Jan gazes at her wordless. It's not her fault; she doesn’t know what she's saying. Every day the women tell them lies like this, and she's only little. It's no surprise that she takes in and believes what they say to her.

"Our parents spoke this way," he reminds her.

Lena kicks a stone away. "Ich habe keine Eltern. Sie sind tod." [I have no parents. They are dead]

The blurb on the back of the book told me what to expect next. Soon his sister is removed too leaving him alone.

Now for the vast majority of kids his age that would have been pretty much the end of his story. All we would be left to find out was whether he survived the war or not. But I'm not an educational psychologist. Myant writes:

The men were killed, the women sent to Ravensbrück and some of the children were sent to Germany to be adopted. This raised questions for me as a psychologist. Quite apart from the appalling trauma of being torn from your family, what did it do to a child to have their identity stripped from them like that? Did they form bonds with their new family, how did they feel when reunited with what remained of their real family after the war, what did the people who were duped into adopting the children feel? The Search explores these issues in the story of Jan and Lena. – The Reading Agency

Virtually all the tales about the war we have are from the perspective of grown-ups with the obvious exception of The Diary of Anne Frank so I can see why this might have piqued her interest. It would never have struck me but this is what we need, the right writer to come in contact with the right material.

The book is written in the present tense, third person, so we go through this as Jan does without the benefit of hindsight. I think the present tense was a sensible choice but I would have liked, as with Anne Frank, to have a first person narrative – just a personal preference – but considering the fact there are two narrative threads she's made the sensible choice I think.

The first thread is Jan's story. A determined young boy, he decides not to sit tight and wait to see how things pan out, rather he resolves to escape from the children's home and try and locate his family. A bit of a tall order.

The second thread revolves around the Schefflers, Friedrich and Gisela, a German couple, and their grown-up son, Wilhelm, who is a soldier away at war. Having lost their own daughter they decide to adopt what they think is a German girl orphaned by the war. What they get is a little Czech girl who has been conditioned to speak German and think of herself as 'Helena'; the girl is, of course, Jan's sister, Lena.

She settles in quickly enough but they soon realise all is not right:

Upstairs, the little girl laughs. She's settling in now, though she's very quiet, and when she speaks, her words don't sound right. The accent's all wrong. When [Friedrich] mentions this to Gisela, saying he thought her language was very poor for a child of her age, Gisela frowned and shook her head. "Poor thing, what do you expect? She's lost both her parents."

"But she says so little. Perhaps she' retarded."

"Have you seen how she helps me round the house? She's smart all right, don’t you doubt it for a minute."

"But –"

"No more buts, Friedrich. She has no parents, and she's from Hamburg, That's why she sounds so different."

People believe what they want to believe . . . or what they need to believe.

Now Jan may be, as I've just said, a determined little boy but he's not especially resourceful. Like Lena he's been forced to learn German but he speaks with a Czech accent, has a very limited vocabulary (enough to do what's required of him) and cannot read German; actually he struggles to read joined-up writing full stop. It’s just as well he makes friends with an older boy called Pawel because he simply isn't equipped to make his escape alone. And, yes, of course, they both escape. It wouldn't be much of a book if they didn't. They learn the address of the farm in Germany where Lena lives and set off to reclaim her. Inconveniently, they wind up near Pawel’s home in Poland instead, but at least there they get some adult assistance and get pointed in the right direction.

Things don't work out, the boys get separated and if it wasn't for Marek, a sympathetic Resistance leader, Jan's story would probably peter out there. But it doesn't and he ends up joining a small band hiding out in the woods. This keeps him relatively safe but doesn’t help him with his task. He bides his time and waits for an opportunity which eventually comes and he gets a final shove towards his goal.

In the meantime we get to learn a bit about the Schefflers and their son who has deserted and ends up living in a hole in the ground in their barn. It's easy to see all Germans as the bad guys and certainly Jan does or at least he would like to. The thing is he keeps getting glimpses of their humanity. When he is up the tree watching the executions in Lidice a young German sees him and helps him escape before he is discovered and during an ambush he comes face to face with another German who pleads for his life before Marek shoots him. And when he finally makes his way to the Schefflers, he ends up in the middle of a situation he could never have anticipated.

In the final chapter everyone's stories collide and rarely does anyone walk away unscathed from a collision. The scars they're all left with are not what any of them could have expected. So, yes, from a plot perspective, all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed but it's not a neat ending, not in that respect, and I was rather grateful for that because in the rest of the book the plot shows through a bit too much for my tastes. It's a little too neat; the writing is clean and professional, like a film script where the action needs a nudge forward and so things happen when they need to happen, even the unexpected bits.

Did I enjoy the book? Is this a book you're supposed to enjoy? It's a book that makes you think. The last chapter certainly makes you think. It made me think and I'm positive it will drag a tear or two out of some of you. This was a side of the war that I knew of but that was about it. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, Ian McEwan's Rose Blanche and the more recent The Boy in Striped Pyjamas this is a story worth telling. Although not marketed as a young adult novel I suspect this book is one that teenagers would get a lot from.

Having got to this point in the review I felt like I'd been nitpicking, dwelling on the negatives rather than the positives, so I contacted the publisher to see if I could ask Myant a few questions. Once you read these I'm sure you'll realise that there's a lot to recommend this book.

Both Schindler's List and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas have been criticised for presenting unrealistic, even sanitised, pictures of their chosen subjects. How important was it for you to present an accurate picture of Jan's journey? (Please feel free to outline your research for the book.)

It was very important. I started the novel when I was working for a PhD in creative writing at Glasgow University. The final thesis comprised a novel about the repercussions of the Holocaust on the lives of three women along with a 40,000 word critical essay about issues relating to writing about the Holocaust. One of the issues was that of representation of the Holocaust. In the essay I argue that there are essentially three critical responses to writing about the Holocaust - the first being that the Holocaust cannot and should not be represented, the second that testimonial accounts are acceptable and the third being that fictional responses are acceptable.

Some critics argue that it is all right for survivors to write fiction about the Holocaust but not for those who were not involved. I think that as the distance from WW2 increases and there are fewer people around who can write about it from personal experience, we will come to rely more on fictional accounts.  I feel strongly that this is something we have to keep alive and I've read with dismay about research which showed that many young people are unaware of the Holocaust (a poll in 2005 suggested 60% of young people under the age of 35 were unaware[1]). Part of my essay goes on to discuss my instinctive feeling that if I were to write about this topic I had to be as accurate as possible and this seems to be the general feeling of Holocaust specialists.

Some feel that inaccurate representations can be used to lend credence to Holocaust deniers (a lot of ire is directed at a TV series of the seventies called Holocaust which was erroneously set in a work camp which in the series was alleged to be a death camp). You mention two of the well known representations which have been criticised severely by some critics. Lanzmann, for example (the director of Shoah) took issue with Spielberg's representation of the gas chambers saying that 'I deeply believe that there are things which cannot and should not be represented.' I was quite critical of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in my thesis because of the inaccuracies in the text but now feel that I was perhaps a bit unfair as the text has stayed with me in a way that few do. But I was concerned about lots of things. There isn't space here to mention all of them but just to take one seemingly small thing: there is a mention of mud towards the end of The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas when Bruno takes off his shoes:  'At first it felt horrible putting his bare feet into so much mud; they sank down to his ankles and every time he lifted a foot it felt worse. But then he started to rather enjoy it (p. 204).' Many survivor accounts I read mention the mud at Auschwitz, one woman, an Italian Jew called Piera Sonnino[2], said of it:

It didn’t seem like earth and water: but something organic that had decomposed, putrefied flesh that had turned liquid. And at the same time, it had a presence of its own. As if death had given birth to monstrous, vermin-like form of life, treacherous and perfidious, which grabbed us by the ankles and kept us from moving quickly as we had been ordered.

I felt that Boyne's bland description was insulting to the perceptions of those who had been there. As you say, a sanitised account.

The research I did for the PhD novel was extremely helpful for The Search and gave me the broad background but in addition I read historical accounts which gave me details about Aryanisation programmes and the Lebensborn project. They gave me the details of how children were selected for these: the medical and psychological tests used (the latter of great interest to me as I work as a psychologist). I read about resistance groups in the occupied countries and how children were used in these. There's not a great deal written about Lidice but I read everything I could about it. I also visited the memorial site at Lidice which has photographic and film evidence of the destruction. Most movingly, it has interviews with some of the children (now in old age) who were sent to German families and the effect this had on them. Some talk about how they have no memory of being taken from their birth mothers but do have vivid memories of being brought back to Czechoslovakia and the wrench they felt leaving the people they had come to think of as their parents. They had lost the knowledge of Czech which they'd had and one man talked about how he felt he never caught up at school because of it. There were differences between siblings, between those who were old enough to have some memory of Lidice and those who were too young to remember it. I was pretty immersed in that time period while I wrote the book.

 

You must have considered at some point including a third plot thread talking about the trials of Jan's mother and sister. Why did you choose to reject it? I have to say towards the end I half-expected the book to end on a cliff-hanger and wondered if a sequel was coming.

Although I didn't consider a third plot thread about Jan's mother (in my mind, Maria is dead) The Search is based on the true story of the village of Lidice and no one knows for sure what happened to the children who weren't selected for Aryanisation but most agree they were likely to have been gassed at Chelmno), I have wondered about a sequel. This would be a novel from Jan's mother's point of view which follows her to Ravensbruck and then to the reunion with Jan and Lena and what happens to them then. I also wanted to write more about Pawel and his experience. I haven't ruled either of these possibilities out for the future.

 

Anne Frank's diary's narrative is, of course, in the first person. Although I agree that your choice of the present tense has its pluses I think I lot could have been gained by using a first person narrative to help us really get inside Jan's head. How do you feel about that?

This is a really interesting question. I didn't at any point consider using the first person voice for Jan and so I have to think retrospectively about this. It's pretty unusual for me not to consider all the options; my computer is full of various versions of things I've written with changes to tense, point of view etc. The novel I wrote for my PhD for example, went through seven or eight serious drafts (by that I mean substantial changes to structure, not just editing). In The Search I used the present tense to try to gain a sense of immediacy and I hope I've been successful in this. I also wanted to keep a certain distance emotionally. This is quite hard to explain. While researching for the PhD, I read a large number of accounts about the Holocaust. These included fictional and biographical accounts as well as historical ones. The Holocaust is obviously a highly emotive topic and there were books I read that had me sobbing for hours. That said though, it is the more measured ones, the ones that report calmly what happened, that have stayed with me. I'm thinking of works like Anne Frank's diary, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's On Auschwitz. I think that at a subconscious level, I was afraid that if I wrote in the first person that I would become over emotional, perhaps even lapse into sentiment and I really wanted to avoid that. Maybe I didn't trust myself as a writer.

 

I'm always concerned when it comes to marketing a book that the cover attracts a certain demographic. I'm not sure for example that I would have picked up this book based solely on the cover. That said, I actually think this is a novel that a lot of young adults would appreciate because it's not too graphic although it is honest. Do you agree?

I like the cover! The Search was published first in Spain (as La Cancion de Jan) and then in Holland (as Zoeken Naar Lena). When Alma picked it up in the UK, they suggested staying with the Spanish cover and I was happy to go with that. I wouldn't have been too happy if they'd chosen the Dutch cover - I'm not at all sure about that one. I suppose my only quibble with this cover is that the boy seems to me to be rather small for a ten year old. I know exactly what you mean about book cover design though - my particular hate are those books for women which have a photograph of a headless young woman on them, often upside down, doing a handstand or a cartwheel or something. What on earth are the publishers trying to say? And as for lime green and neon pink covers with that curly font in relief...

I agree that the novel might appeal to young adults and this has been suggested to me by friends and colleagues who have read it. I hope that its honesty will appeal to a wide audience though.  

 

AFTERTHOUGHT

Having carefully read through these answers I have to say that I have come to look at this book a little differently. That said I've not edited what I wrote before because that was my initial reaction and I can't change that. So what would I have done differently, maybe added in pages and pages of existential angst? I don't know.

Certainly my respect for historical fiction writers is growing.

***

Maureen Myant is a senior educational psychologist based in Glasgow. In 2004 she was awarded a New Writers’ Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council and she has completed her MLit in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She is married with three grown-up children.

The Search is her first novel to appear in print however her short story 'Tea in Tashkent', one of a series of linked short stories set in the USSR appear in the print anthology Knuckle End: An Anthology of Emerging Scottish Literary Talent. You can read 'A Parting Gift', another story from the collection, here. At the moment she is working on a novel about a trip to the USSR in the late seventies by a British tour group.

The Search is published in the UK by Alma Books and retails at £12.99 which sounds like a lot but it is printed on good paper and it feels like a substantial volume in your hand.

 

REFERENCES

---

[1] Last year a comprehensive BBC poll found that only 55 percent of Britons (and just 40 percent of those aged 18 - 35) had heard of Auschwitz, the death camp where one fifth of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered.

A new BBC poll reveals that 94 percent of respondents now say they have heard of Auschwitz, including 86 percent of those under 35.

This change is likely caused by:

(a) The comprehensive and generally accurate media coverage of the commemorations surrounding the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

(b) The widespread media coverage of the scandal around Prince Harry wearing Nazi regalia at a costume party.

(c) The BBC itself must take some credit after it broadcast in late January of its program "Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution," parts of which were watched by more than one-third of the UK population.

- Tom Gross, "Holocaust Memorial Day raises awareness among Britons" (AFP / Yahoo news, March 17, 2005)

[2] Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Beckett the tinkerer (part one)

We're not entirely restrictive. We're not . . . conservers of museum pieces. Not at all.  — Edward Beckett

There is a school of thought (passionately held by many) that holds that it is tantamount to sacrilege to tamper with one of Samuel Beckett's texts. In the most recent (and most successful) run of Waiting for Godot some have criticised the production for playing for laughs. Had they forgotten that this was supposed to be a comedy?

It is true that his estate now keeps a wary eye on new performances and has waded in where it thought the director was overstepping the mark. And some have done exactly that. A famous one is where director Deborah Warner tampered – slightly – with Beckett's one-woman play, Footfalls. She made two main changes:

[T]here were two occasions when a small number of lines had been purposely reassigned, spoken not by the ancient mother (who is present in the play just as a voice) but by her daughter.

[and]

Rather than pace up and down the one narrow strip of stage, Fiona Shaw's May has two fields of operation: a rostrum erected at the front of the dress circle where, on each turn of her robotic shuffle, she has to clutch nervously at the overhanging masonry; and the dark vast void of the main stage.[1]

There were also some issues concerning May's costume. For one critic, the effect of Warner's changes was "a bit like seeing someone doodling on a Rembrandt".[2]

Most people frankly wouldn't have noticed the changes nor objected once they were pointed out but the Beckett estate had the play shut down and a planned production in France stopped.

While condemning the production, Edward Beckett, the playwright's nephew and executor, said: "I don't want to preserve the plays in aspic. I think that would be harmful to Sam and to the estate. We're not trying to produce cloned productions, but we insist they play the play as Sam wrote it."

Watching the production at its opening performance, he thought, in the manner of a Beckett character, "This can't go on." In that performance, five lines of dialogue had been transposed from mother to daughter. At the estate's insistence, the lines were returned to their original speaker. But there were other problems. "The production destroyed the play's timing, atmosphere, the ghostly aspect," Edward Beckett said. "The hypnotic effect of the words was shattered by the perambulation. And for what purpose?"[3]

You can read an interview with Edward Beckett here.

But where did the man himself stand? Should his plays be simply performed as opposed to interpreted? Since Billie Whitelaw has already given the definitive performances of Winnie in Happy Days, May in Footfalls, W in Rockaby and Mouth in Not I — each under Beckett's exacting personal direction — why don't we simply set up a screen in front of the audience showing her doing it right and be done with it?

Beckett rehearsing Footfalls with Billie Whitelaw
at the Royal Court Theatre, 1976

If we can take a cinematic example, what about the 1998 remake of Psycho which duplicated Hitchcock's 1960 original only this time in glorious colour? In general this wasn't well received. And the big question was: Why not? The consensus was that it brought nothing new to the table, so what's the point of it? At least Tim Burton's "reimagining" of Planet of the Apes was a genuine attempt to update the material even if it too didn't succeed.

The fact of the matter is that "[t]hough protective of his plays' integrity, [Beckett] was always ready to approve or admire when he saw something unorthodox that worked (italics mine)."[4] It is true that Beckett did, on occasion, made a fuss. He tried to stop the first New York production of his 35-second play Breath on the grounds that his stage directions weren't being fully adhered to. One has to bear in mind that Breath consists of nothing but stage directions. Certainly, the producers of Oh! Calcutta, to which the sketch made a contribution, must have realised that there's a significant difference between 'Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold light about five seconds' and the same orders with the phrase 'including naked bodies' tagged on after the word 'rubbish'.

This was an exceptional case though. In most instances Beckett actually sought compromise if indeed he did anything. He did make every effort to stop productions of Waiting for Godot where women took the leads. To his mind it was ludicrous to tamper with the roles: "Women don't have prostates,"[5] he commented at one point, referring to Vladimir's constant need to urinate because of his ailing prostate.

Many of the appeals made to Beckett requesting permission for performances of this kind were of a fervently personal nature, and he actually yielded in at least one case, telling a German director that her production could go on as long as it had only one run, and as long as the publicity for the production made clear his position of "total disapproval" (his German publishers, however, refused to authorise this Godot).[6]

He had no problem with the tramps' colour though:

[O]ne of the productions in which Beckett became most deeply invested in a personal sense took place in South Africa, during a period of particularly bad political turbulence. Beckett despised the policy of apartheid in South Africa, and had ruled that his plays could only be performed in non-segregated theatres. […] But in 1976, the young director of a new, mixed-race Johannesburg troupe wrote to Beckett's agent requesting permission to stage Godot as its debut production. The cast was intended to be multi-racial, as was the audience, and Beckett consented, but the cast turned out eventually to be entirely black and the scanty audiences almost entirely white, due to the great risk involved for black people in attending the production.[7]

Kyle Manzay, left, and Wendell Pierce perform
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

The director Herbert Blau, who introduced American audiences to some of the country's first productions of Samuel Beckett, found Beckett's often vehement objections to his texts being adapted both a little strange, and out of character:

Beckett taught us before theory that paratextuality[8] is built into the language, and, as with the gospels derided by Didi and Gogo, no text is sacred. That people are inclined to do odd things with Beckett's own texts is, one might say, a matter of poetic justice.[9]

When it came to directing his own plays things were a little different:

Between 1953, when Waiting for Godot was first staged in Paris, and 1967, Samuel Beckett served a fourteen-year theatrical apprenticeship, moving from being a consultant in the staging of his dramatic works to taking full responsibility for their direction. During his twenty-year directing career, 1967-1986, Beckett staged some seventeen productions of his work in three languages, English, French, and German. Each time he returned to his plays — most often to texts already in print — to prepare them for staging, he was dissatisfied. He found his plays wordy and incompletely conceived for the stage, and so he set about revising them as he staged them. Of Godot, for instance, he has said on more than one occasion, "I knew nothing about theatre when I wrote it," and during rehearsals in Berlin in 1967 for Endspiel (Endgame) he conceded that the play was "not visualized" (Theatrical Notebooks. Vol. II xv).

[…]

As Beckett grew increasingly dissatisfied with his plays as published, he decided in 1986, after years of suggesting that theatrical directors not stage the published scripts but follow instead his directorial revisions, to authorize publication of his theatrical notebooks and what he called "corrected texts" for his plays, that is, texts which incorporated the revisions he made as a director, along with the notebooks in which the rationale of those revisions was worked out. This was an extraordinary decision on Beckett's part, essentially repudiating his dramatic cannon as published and available to the public, and offering instead a much more fluid and multiple series of performing texts.[10]

The changes he made in his plays were sometimes minor and sometimes not: in Not I he excised the role of the Auditor completely, brought it back and then removed it again (to date though no script for the play suggests that the elimination of the Auditor is a directorial option); in Krapp's Last Tape he changed Krapp's costume and appearance, fiddled with the stage directions (most noticeably removing the slapstick element from the play) and in What Where, which I'll come back to, he took advantage of modern technology to reduce the actors to talking heads floating in space, a radical departure from the written text.

In 1985 Samuel Beckett directed Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame as stage pieces with the San Quentin Players:

Though the initial productions as staged in 1985 already brought forth substantial changes in the published acting texts of the plays, each time a re-mounting of the productions occurred additional changes were made. The same was true during the production period for these television versions, with Beckett sometimes making textual changes on the telephone even as a given scene was being taped.[11]

These films are now regarded as the definitive productions as far as the text goes but who is to say what further changes Beckett might have made had he lived longer. You can see all of these here:

DOWNLOAD or STREAM from UbuWeb

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 1 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 2 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Endgame (1985)

I never got to see the most recent production of Waiting for Godot, the one featuring Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart but I did get to see some snippets care of the Theatreland programmes on Sky Arts 1. One thing that was brought up several times by the actors was the ephemeral nature of theatre. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the arguments but the simple fact is that the vast majorities of productions of Beckett's plays worldwide come and go and will be forgotten in time. And in time he will be just another Shakespeare with people questioning the productions of the day and arguing about the validity of any given performance or interpretation and there will be no on left who worked with Beckett or even knew him to say yea or nay.

And that is how it should be. A play is a thing to be discovered in exactly the same way as a symphony is. Have you any idea how many times Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has been recorded? I think I have four copies myself. And who is to say which one is right? For starters they don't make instruments the same as they used to. But each performance brings out something the conductor saw and thought deserved to be highlighted. Plays are no different.

There was a recording of Krapp's Last Tape that Beckett got to see where, as the lights faded, all we were left with was the red light of the tape recorder. This fortunate happenstance delighted Beckett. It wasn't scripted because he's never thought of it at the time he wrote the play being pretty unfamiliar with how this new-fangled mechanism worked. In a letter to Alan Schneider Beckett described it as "the beautiful and quite accidental effect in London of the luminous eye burning up as the machine runs on in silence and the light goes down."[12]

Likewise when Carey Perloff had the opportunity to direct Charlotte Rae in Happy Days she had her daughter on set with her and at the time:

At the time of rehearsals my daughter Alexandra was just a year old, that age when the favourite game is pulling everything out of Mummy's purse. Often during the Happy Days rehearsal process Lexie would sit in the corner of the theatre, stealthily opening my purse and removing the contents. . .

I should interject here that by 'purse' she means 'handbag' — I have an American wife, I know about these things.

. . .arranging everything in a circle around her. She knew the contents of the bag by heart; it was not the surprise factor that kept her returning to the "empty-the-purse" game but, instead, the sheer joy of recognition in seeing those familiar objects reappear every time the game was played. She exhibited so many of Winnie's behavioural traits that Charlotte and I would stop rehearsals and watch Lexie perform her illicit game.[13]

Needless to say the women took this joy from Lexie and incorporated it into the performance. Was that wrong? Beckett fathered no children so it's unlikely he was around them enough for them to have a direct effect on his writing but, had he been the director, might he not also have taken opportunity of the synchronicity of the moment?

Beckett only started making major changes in his plays after watching them over and over again, till they were in danger of becoming stale, till he could really distance himself from the text and see the thing as a work apart from the words on the page. In Nacht und Träume we have the following stage directions:

9. From same dark R appears with a cup, conveys it gently to B's lips. B drinks, R disappears.

10. R reappears with a cloth, wipes gently B's brow, disappears with cloth.

and that's it. In his production "Beckett used a wine glass and a studiously folded napkin, which evoked association of objects used during mass" whereas when Antoni Libera directed his version he used "a 'poor-looking' cup and a 'poor-looking' wrinkled cloth . . . to intensify the impression of the poverty of the Dreamer: even in his most extravagant dream he sees objects that he probably uses every day; only the fact of who uses them and for what is remarkable."[14]

Was he wrong or are Beckett's stage directions simply imprecise? Is that what the problem is? Or does it really not matter? Considering how pernickety many of Beckett's directions are — at least the aspects he considers important — one has to say, no, not in this case; the overtones that the choice of vessel and type of cloth are clearly secondary to what's going on. This doesn’t mean they shouldn't be given some consideration — what else is a director supposed to do when faced with a Beckett play? — but they are not the be all and end all.

Performance became an increasingly important part of the creative process for Beckett. But as far back as 1956 he was becoming aware that what he had written had its limits. As he wrote to an American friend, Pamela Mitchell, on 28^th September 1956: "The new play [Fin de partie] is now as finished as it is possible before rehearsals (italics mine).[15] And the same in 1963 when he wrote to Barney Rosset: "I realise I can't establish definitive text of Play without a certain number of rehearsals."[16]

This of course is simply fine-tuning but it sets the groundwork for the discoveries he made during later rehearsals and performances when actors did more than simply repeat his words parrot-fashioned. A simple example would be the "personal relationship" between Krapp and his tape recorder that Patrick Magee projected in his performance; this goes beyond words.[17] One would have imagined though in the 24 years between that first performance of Fin de partie and the 1980 performance by the San Quentin Drama Workshop that he would have ironed out the creases but apparently not. The actor Alan Mandell (who played Nagg in that production) remembers:

Beckett was a tireless editor, making many cuts and changes in the text during the rehearsal period. 'There's too much text,' he would say with irritation in his voice, and then he would make a cut. It had to do with the way a line scanned, so that a change in a line, though minor to the actor, was major to the playwright.[18]

A scene from the San Quentin Drama Workshop's production
of Endgame featuring Alan Mandell as Nagg

In his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, his friend James Knowlson acknowledges that his reputation "as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his own work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause" was somewhat exaggerated and "the truth of his position was more complex and certainly more interesting than this caricature suggests."[19]

Let's take two examples, the American Repertory Theatre Company's 1984 production of Endgame in a subway and the 1983 Belgian production in a former warehouse flooded with water. Which do you think he made a fuss over? I would have though the both of them but that wasn't the case. The Belgian production went ahead unchallenged whereas the American version almost reached the courts; a compromise was met — "Beckett insisting in an agreed programme insert that that the play, as it was being staged, was no longer his play."[20] Understandably the director was aggrieved. He saw this as double-standards and once you get down to it he was right. "It made a tremendous difference [to Beckett] if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different."[21]

My own personal opinion is that I welcome innovation. The Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache is well known for his unorthodox interpretations of the works of major composers like Beethoven and Mahler. Indeed his recorded performances differ so widely from the majority of other recordings that this has led them to be seen by some as collectors' items rather than mainstream releases, 'one-offs' rather than reference recordings. Is that a bad thing? When you've heard Beethoven's Fifth as many times as I have it does lose some of its magic and what you need is someone to make you look at it afresh. Celibidache's version is the most stately I've ever heard; it never gets ahead of itself. Celibidache is not saying that this is the way is must be done, rather this is how it can be done. And I accept new interpretations of Beckett's work in much the same way.

In Part two of this article I'm going to look in close detail at one particular play, What Where and show how Beckett couldn't leave this one alone.

In the meantime let me leave you with a graphical score animation of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

 

References

---

[1] Paul Taylor, 'Theatre, Way Our of Line', The Independent, Friday, 18 March 1994

[2] Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian

[3] Mel Gusson, 'Modify Beckett? Enter, Outrage', The New York Times, Saturday, March 26, 1994

[4] Katherine Worth, 'Beckett on the world stage', Christopher Murray, ed., Samuel Beckett – 100 Years, p154

[5] Linda Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett: performance and critical perspectives, p x

[6] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[7] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[8] Paratextuality incorporates every secondary “text” e.g. reviews or author interviews all become part of the paratext. How many people come to the Bible without some prior knowledge that colours their interpretation of the text itself?

[9] Interview with Herbert Blau in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p57

[10] S E Gontarski, 'Editing Beckett', Twentieth Century Literature, v. 41 (Summer '95) p. 190-207

[11] Beckett Directs Beckett, Grey Lodge

[12] Letter to Alan Schneider, 4 Jan. 1960, qtd. in M. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 59.

[13] Carey Perloff, 'Three Women and a Mound: Directing Happy Days' in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p165

[14] Interview with Antoni Libera in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p123

[15] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p199

[16] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p201

[17] Maurice Harmon ed., No Author Better Served: the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, p50

[18] Alan Mandell in James and Elizabeth Knowlson eds., Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett, p201

[19] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 691

[20] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692

[21] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692, 693

Travels in the Scriptorium Part II

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing. - from Paul Auster's acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters

If you have not read Part I then here is a link. You may not want to read this at all afterwards.

Paul Auster is an American writer, based in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Newark, New Jersey to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. As well as prose he has also written poetry, screenplays, essays, memoirs and an autobiography in addition to editing collections and translating other people's work. Before the publication of The New York Trilogy, three existential detective stories, Auster was best known for having edited the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and for having written several insightful literary essays – not the stuff best sellers generally grow from. He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie.

His writing style has been described as “finely-wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences and mysteries.” Most critics would label him as post-modern (occasionally post-apocalyptic) with a fondness for metafiction; characters migrate from one novel to the next, as do props (a red notebook, the same kind in which he writes, in particular) and he occasionally inserts himself into the narrative, sometimes as the pseudonymous 'Mr Trause', sometimes as 'Paul Auster'.

Michael Dirda puts it this way:

Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots—drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography—keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through. – 'Spellbound', The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008

Auster wrote Travels in the Scriptorium whilst trying to raise funding to film his screenplay, The Inner Life of Martin Frost:

I was on the phone all day every day to producers, getting nowhere. Finally, Siri said: 'You have to get out of the house. Go to work in your office (he writes in a Spartan rented room near his Park Slope home). Go doodle, you noodle!' she said. 'You can't keep knocking your head against a brick wall.' Siri was right – always is! – so I wrote Scriptorium... – Jackie McGlone, 'A voice in the darkness - Paul Auster interview', The Scotsman, 1st August 2009

Now I don't know about you but when I think of “a Spartan rented room” two things jump immediately to my mind, the empty room – empty bar an upright piano and stool – where Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring and the various rooms that Samuel Beckett has written in throughout his life. The photograph on the cover of my copy of Travels in the Scriptorium shows such a room, a room that also appears in many of Beckett's later television plays (e.g Eh Joe, Nacht und Traúme and Ghost Trio) and his only film.

There is a stronger connection with Beckett than that though. Auster edited the recent 4-volume Grove edition of Beckett's (almost) complete works. I never really thought about it at the time nor did I wonder why he gets a chapter in Beckett Remembering – Remembering Beckett since at the time he was just a name to me and no more. As it happens he was a friend of Beckett's although he admits not a close one; perhaps had he continued in France he might have become on. They first met when, as a young man of twenty-four living in Paris, he chanced his arm and wrote Beckett a letter asking to meet him. Three days later he received an invitation to meet with him at La Closerie des Lilacs. Over the years they shared correspondence – Auster would send him copies of his work – and Beckett was very supportive when Auster got the job of editing the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and contributed translations of Apollinaire, Breton and Eluard. Auster admits that as a young man his love of Beckett's work “bordered on idolatry” and it's easy to see Beckettian influences in his work. Reading reviews and articles about Auster Beckett's name crops up frequently. But, is there a stronger connection yet?

In the book that follows Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, Auster makes quite obvious nods towards him as with this little quote which combines thoughts from Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable and Worstward Ho:

Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m trying to tell to the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give it my best effort.

In Travels in the Scriptorium he draws inspiration from other writings. The protagonist here is one that features in a great deal of Beckett's writing, an old man:

The only fact that can be set down with any certainty is that he is not young, but the word old is a flexible term and can be used to describe a person anywhere between sixty and a hundred. We will therefore drop the epithet old man and henceforth refer to the person in the room as Mr. Blank.

Sounds like a character from Watt. We learn later from a woman called Sophie who is described as being “somewhere in her late forties or early fifties” that Mr. Blank is “a lot older” than she is but we never learn his exact age nor do we ever learn his first name.

Like many of Beckett's characters he is struggling with issues of identity and memory; the man in That Time is a good example. Like him Blank is dependent on external forces to generate memories. The first comes when he sits in the chair at the desk. He gets a wave of pleasure from the experience especially when he discovers that “an invisible spring mechanism … allows him to rock back and forth at will”. This brings back a childhood memory of a “rocking horse that sat in his bedroom when he was a small boy … whose name was Whitey and who, in the young Mr. Blank's mind, was not a wooden object adorned with white paint but a living being, a true horse.” The next comes when he looks at one of the photos on the desk; a picture of a young woman conjures up the name “Anna” and a feeling of “overpowering love” The image is not a million miles away from Krapp sitting at his desk wallowing in his own past.

Then a phone call from one James P. Flood, “a minor character”, at least that is how he describes himself, who wants to visit him. From Flood he discovers that he is being cared for by a woman named Anna, who, Flood tells Blank, “[o]f all the people involved in this story, she's the only one who's completely on your side.” Is this the same Anna in the photo? For some reason he thinks she might be dead and that he is somehow responsible for her death.

Apart from the photos there are also pages, some handwritten, others typewritten. The typed pages appear to be a story, a report actually, written by a man in a cell in the garrison town of “Ultima: the westernmost tip of the Confederation, the place that stands at the edge of the known world … overlooking the unmapped expanses of the Alien Territories. The law says that no one is allowed to go out there. I went,” the man writes, “because I was ordered to go and now I have returned to give my report.”

So, what is this? Is this an allegory? Is the room, as in Endgame, the inside of a human skull? Are these characters in a story? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? Or is this set in a strange future? Is the Confederation friend or foe? Has the world been invaded by aliens? Who are the “shadow-beings” that invade his thoughts when he closes his eye? Did he write the story he's been reading? Is it a story or an actual report? He sounds like Moran after writing his report of Molloy's disappearance – in the book of the same name – and wondering if Molloy really existed. So many questions.

Anna arrives with his breakfast but she is not the same woman as in the photo; she has aged and could be anything between forty-five and sixty; the photograph apparently was taken thirty-five years earlier. She encourages him to breakfast before the meal gets cold but first his pills which he stubbornly only agrees to take if she gives him “a real kiss” which she does without squabbling with him. The pills make him twitch so badly that he can't feed himself; Anna takes over.

Afterwards she wants to know if he needs to use the bathroom and whether he requires any assistance. Yes, he does and no, he doesn't. Nothing is glossed over:

The pyjama bottoms fall to his ankles; he sits down on the toilet seat; his bladder and bowels prepare to evacuate their pent-up liquids and solids. Urine flows from his penis, first one stool and then a second stool slide from his anus, and so good does it feel to be relieving himself in this manner that he forgets the sorrow that took hold of him just moments before. Of course he can manage on his own, he tells himself. He's been doing it ever since he was a little boy, and when it comes to pissing and shitting, he's as capable as any person in the world. Not only that, but he's an expert at wiping his ass as well.

Beckett, of course, never shied away from the scatalogical. The novella The End springs to mind here. Blank cannot get his pyjama bottoms back up and Anna has to help him. He wants to bathe but agrees to a sponge bath instead. The woman's ministrations cause him to have an erection:

We're feeling frisky today, Mr. Blank, Anna says.

I'm afraid so, Mr. Blank whispers, his eyes still shut. I can't help it.

If I were you, I'd feel proud of myself. Not every man your age is still . . . still capable of this.

It has nothing to do with me. The thing has a life of its own.

With that and without fuss or further discussion she relieves Mr. Blank of his problem. This recalls Beckett's short story 'Enough' although the method of release differs. Did you notice no inverted commas around the speech? Another Beckettism.

Afterwards Anna provides Mr. Blank with some more tantalising clues. He had apparently sent her on a dangerous “mission” (his word) which she barely survived; she was once married to a man called David Zimmer who has now died, something Blank is only indirectly responsible for. And yet she is clearly devoted to the old man, above and beyond the call of duty. He apologises for everything he's put her through:

I'm sorry

Don't be. Without you, I never would have met David in the first place. Believe me Mr. Blank, it isn't your fault. You do what you have to do, and then things happen. Good things and bad things both. That's the way of it. We might be the ones who suffer, but there's a reason for it, a good reason, and anyone who complains about it doesn't understand what it means to be alive.

She helps him dress – all in white, “a special request . . . [f]rom Peter Stillman” – and then leaves. Mr. Blank, all dressed in white, now that's got to be a clue for us and not him.

At this point we're 25 pages into a 130 page novella. I haven't got a clue what's going on but my head is buzzing with ideas.

Did you ever watch Masters of Science Fiction when it was on? There was one episode called 'A Clean Escape' that's very similar to this, a man in a room who can't remember. It's based on a short story by John Kessel. The man happens to be the president of the United States, the very president who finally pressed the button. Outside, although in the safety of his bunker he is unaware of it, a nuclear winter is raging. The problem is he can't retain memories for more than forty-five minutes. The whole episode revolves around a female psychiatrist's efforts to get him to remember so that he can be held accountable for his actions.

Was something similar happening here? Is that why Flood wants to see him? Is that why Auster goes to pains to point out that he's an ex-policeman? Are there no more policemen?

In the previous post I mentioned that the Guardian said that “[f]ans wouldn't be able to resist consuming [this book] whole” but what I didn't realise was that there's a clue here, the word “fans”. I think most people would agree that if you're going to start reading Beckett then The Unnamable should probably not be your first port of call. The book's intertextuality would miss you. Names like Molloy, Watt and Murphy would be simply that, names, however “fans” of Beckett's writing would recognise these as important touchstones – each of these three has their own book for starters – and it's the same with the world Auster has created for Mr. Blank, it's populated with names (or is it characters?) from his previous books: Peter Stillman is a character (actually two characters, father and son) in City of Glass, the first book in the New York Trilogy; David Zimmer is the main character in The Book of Illusions; James P. Flood appeared first in Moon Palace and In the Country of Last Things Auster describes the odyssey of nineteen year-old Anna to find her brother in a post-apocalyptic vision of New York, told to a childhood friend in a letter that will never be read. There are more. I won't list them all. But what connects all these disparate characters? Mr. Blank, that's who. And who is he?

Fans will pick up on more subtle stuff. The story that Mr. Blank begins to read about the Confederation, “why does the prose sound like something written in the nineteenth century?” Perhaps because the American transcendentalism of the early to middle nineteenth century is a major influence in him, specifically authors like Hawthorne and Melville. The subtle inside jokes and a-ha moments like this are endless. For example, a character called Fanshawe makes an appearance later in the book too. Fanshawe is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A certain Mr. Trause also pops his head in too.

There is a precision to Auster's writing that suggests Beckett's mature prose where he meticulously covers all options in painstaking (and sometimes painful to read) detail. The language is stripped down (shades of the mature Beckett again) and reads like a report which we are told at the start of the book this is. In an interview Auster had this to say:

It's stripped-down because it's the language of the report. That's the form of the novel; it's a report. So it doesn't read necessarily like a piece of fiction. So much the better, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a fascinating read but the ending may well frustrate many because much is not answered. People who love shows like Lost where we're drip-fed clues will get caught up in this book right away but woe betide the network if that last episode doesn't answer all their questions. Auster does provide us with an answer if you've not worked it out yourself. No, Blank's not the president and, no, aliens haven't landed on earth. Having read a great number of reviews of the book I can tell you that not everyone was pleased with how things get wrapped up. And some of these were “fans” too. But there are fans and there are fans. I'm the kind of fan of Beckett's who spends six weeks researching Waiting for Godot and who gets silly-excited when I discover some nibblet of information that I never knew before.

I wouldn't go so far as to say: “Don't read this book,” because you don't need to know his entire canon by heart to get where he's coming from. In the same interview he says:

People who come upon this book not having read anything of mine before will read it in one way, and I'm hoping that there's enough in it so that it will be compelling. That's the gamble I've made. People who are familiar with my work will get more out of it, I think. But I don't think not knowing is going to make for a bad experience. At least, I hope not.

How do I feel about Auster after reading this book? I want to read more and soon. I've already ordered a copy of The New York Trilogy from Amazon. At 1p plus postage, what's there to lose?

Travels in the Scriptorium Part I

I knew very little about Paul Auster when I bought this book. I knew the name. I knew of him and that he was a respected, probably American, author. It was certainly why I picked the book up although I suspect its size – it's only 130 pages long – would have been the first thing that attracted me to it. The austere cover was striking, although I'm sure I only saw the book's spine; I doubt the book's title had even registered at this point, however, once it did, this would have been a definite plus.

I expect I flipped the book over in my hand and scanned the blurb. I sometimes do I sometimes don't; it's a mood thing. Since I can't remember – I bought the book well over a year ago – let's assume that I did. This is what I would have read:

An old man wakes alone in an almost empty room, unable to remember his past. The only clues to his identity are a manuscript, a pile of photos and a visitor called Anna who sparks memories of forgotten love and tragedy. A mystery about memory, growing old and our responsibilities, Travels in the Scriptorium is a brilliant new work from one of America's best-loved and lost intriguing storytellers.

That I can tell you here and now would have done it for me but now I've begun to write about it I'm sure I opened the book and read the first page:

The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor. He has no idea that a camera is planted in the ceiling directly above him. The shutter clicks silently once every second, producing eighty-six thousand four hundred still photos with every revolution of the earth. Even if he knew he was being watched, it wouldn't make any difference. His mind is elsewhere, stranded among the figments in his head as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him

Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all. For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions.

There are a number of objects in the room, and on each one a strip of white tape has been affixed to the surface, bearing a single word written out in block letters. On the bedside table, for example, the word is TABLE. On the lamp the word is LAMP. Even on the wall, which is not strictly speaking an object, there is a strip of tape that reads WALL. The old man looks up for a moment, sees the wall...

1

And that's probably as far as I went. Is this a cell or a room in a hospice? Is he prisoner or patient? Based on the above information, would you buy the book? Yes, or no? Fine, then I'm done. This could be my shortest book review ever.

I read the book in two sittings one night after the other although once I'd reached the halfway point I was so embroiled in the story that the man is reading that I wanted to continue. Forty pages is usually my limit at one sitting, after that my concentration starts to go and I need to do something different, answer e-mails or maybe something physical. That I'd read sixty-five pages and wanted to go on does say something.

I didn't mention the quote on the cover. I didn't mention it before because I don't generally pay much attention to quotes no matter how illustrious a paper they're from. This particular one was from the Guardian:

Fans won't be able to resist consuming it whole.

For what it's worth I concur with that assessment. Had I become a fan by this point though? It's probably safe to say, no, but I was well on the way to becoming one. My one overriding fear at this point was that I was going to get to the end and he was going to let me down.

A part of me would like to leave you there. You already know more than I did. In fact I'm going to. Another post will go up in a couple of minutes which will talk about what I've learned if you're interested but I'm still not going to tell you what the book is about and I am absolutely not going to give away the ending, which, depending on who you are will either have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming: “How could I not have seen that? All the clues were there.” or chucking the book across the room going: “Was that it? For Christ's sake, was that it?” Personally I veered towards the former although I have to confess to being a bit disappointed that what I had imagined in my head was so far from the mark.

And with that I'll leave you. If your curiosity gets the better of you then there's a link to the second part of this review below.

Part II

Where are all the poetical prodigies?

 

If you were asked to think of a prodigy, who would jump to mind? I would suggest that that list would be topped by Mozart. Wee Wölfi began to play the harpsichord when he was 3. By 5 he was performing publicly and had begun composing. But were these early pieces any good? Well, good enough at the time but the earliest work by him that is still performed today is Exsultate, Jubilate K165, written in 1773 when he was 17. (The K refers to Köchel, a musicologist who catalogued Mozart's complete output which makes Exsultate, Jubilate his 165^th composition.)

Musical prodigies come ten a penny. If I restrict myself to the composers, though, there are a few well-known names there who made careers out of music: Mendelssohn was 12 when he started; Nino Rota and Korngold (best known as composer of film music) began at 11; Bizet entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 10 whilst Menotti began writing music at the tender age of 7, as did Paganini, Barber and Rheinberger.

So, how do you decide who's the greatest? According to the Times:

Ask most people to name classical music’s greatest child prodigy and you’d guess they would probably say Mozart. Not according to a poll in next month’s BBC Music Magazine, where Mendelssohn comes top, followed by Schubert. And Mozart? Not even in the top 10.

This rum result is partly to do with a condition of the poll, carried out by the country’s “most renowned” critics. The composers’ works had to be written before they were 18. And although little Wolfgang might have begun scribbling at the age of 5, he did nothing of great note, apparently, until his Symphony in A Major, K201, written when he was already 18. Quite a put-down for a man who composed more than 600 works before his death, aged 35. – TimesOnline, May 17^th 2009

There was a recent television series highlighting the talents of Alex Prior (born 5 October 1992 in London) who began composing when he was only 8 and has already got 4 symphonies, 4 concertos, 2 ballets and an opera under his belt; the programme we saw concerned his Concerto for 4 soloists and orchestra, Velesslavitsa, the premiere of which featured 4 child prodigies as the soloists that were hand-picked during the series.

Just what is a child prodigy, though?

According to American developmental psychologist Dr David Henry Feldman, typically it is a child younger than 10 who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field of endeavour. – thestar.com

Other sites say they can be anything up to 13 or even 15.

Musical prodigies are well known, as are science prodigies, maths prodigies, chess prodigies, but where are the poets?

In the future I won't need a Köchel to come along and catalogue my poems. I've been cataloguing and numbering them since I was 13 and by the time I'd reached 17 I'd already passed the 400 mark, 99% of which were eminently forgettable. I was first published at 16 and continued to see my name in print from then on. But was I a prodigy? I think not.

Wikipedia has a list of child prodigies and from it I extracted the poets:

Ervin Hatibi published his first poems at 14 in the major journals of the time, and, at 15, published his first book - well acclaimed by the critics.

William Cullen Bryant was published at 10 years old; at 13 years old, he published a book of political-satire poems.

Thomas Chatterton started as a poet at 11 years old. He began writing the poems that would make him famous at 12 years old.

Lucretia Maria Davidson, by 11 years old, had written some poems of note; before her death at 16 years old, she received praise as a writer.

Marjorie Fleming was a published poet before her death at 8 years old.

H. P. Lovecraft recited poetry at 2 years old and wrote long poems at 5 years old.

Other than Lovecraft – and who thinks of him as a poet nowadays? – I knew none of the names. So I started to see what I could discover on my own.

Milton was my first discovery, the only one I know as a poet. He started writing when he was 10.

Frankly, I don't think 10 is that amazing. And I certainly expect there are loads of poets out there who began writing by the age of 12. The question is: Have they written anything memorable? And I bet the answer is: No. I still have all my juvenilia. Almost all the paintings and music are long gone following a stupid self-righteous clear out about twenty years ago but the poems survived. I can think of very little I own from before I was twenty apart from them. A letter opener from Arran (or perhaps Dunoon) is the only other thing that jumps to mind although it's an ugly thing with some animal's leg as a handle. I have no idea what possessed me to buy it even at the time.

One prodigy I found online is a young girl called Akiane Kramarik, who is 13 now. You can read a selection of the poetry she has written between the ages of 7 and 11 here. She's probably better known as a painter and, while I'm not particularly taken by her work’s New Age-ness, I can't criticise her technique. I have seen far worse made into mass-market prints. One has to wonder if Mozart would be marketed more vigorously nowadays and I guess knowing what I do about Leopold (his dad) the answer would be: Yes.

I'm going to have a look at one of Akiane's poems on the subject of love. I'm assuming she was 11 when she wrote this one and, of course, one has to ask: What does a kid of 11 know about love?

Love

Love is never alone
Love is always crowded
Love is the shared self
We cannot own our love
And we cannot teach our love
The longest breath of love
is the shortest distance to heaven
The deepest life is love
The deepest love is an embrace
Love is not rest
Love is peace
Love is the purpose

Seriously I wonder how many times people have attempted this very poem? And how do you write about love without dipping into the vast well of clichés that exist revolving around it? That's a hard one. I suppose it's one of those we need to get out of our system before we move on. Akiane's chosen to go down the 1 Corinthians 13 route and that's just fine, agape love is as valid a subject as any of the other loves. The problem is, how to improve on the scripture:

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I actually think she's done a fair job. And I so badly want to write ". . . for a kid," but I'm not going to. The whole thing about prodigies is that they need to be measured on adult terms – Akiane is either a good poet, full stop, or she's not. On the whole I think what's she's produced is the kind of stuff that a lot of kids who've undergone a strict religious upbringing might have done; yes, she's a bit precocious but I don’t see her, poetically anyway, as a child genius; her art is another thing entirely.

My very first poem was about love, the unrequited kind. 275 poems later I finally got round to trying to define love and it's just about as bad as you'd expect with a line like "Olives, vines and marble pillars" in it but I don't mind sharing poem #1 because I realised when I'd written it that I had something, didn't know quite what and it was years before it became clear to me:

Dreams Don't Come True

I put my arm around her shoulder,
I touched her skin:
So soft.
It was all unreal, a fantasy.
Her hands were on her lap.
Her lips were sealed.
So cold.
She was so cold.
And I,
So helpless.

A beautiful thing,
Lovely and fair,
Colder than ice,
Heart of stone,
She and I alone:
And she was so cold.

I talked a little,
She laughed me off.
Like the fly on the horse's back,
Crushed my dream,
Crushed my hope,
Squashed my life, my soul.

And she was so cold.

I never dated my poems back then but I'd say I was 13 at the time. And I'm sure it's not the worst poem that a 13-year-old has written but I would never pretend to be any kind of prodigy. For all that it's still a poem that still manages to please me 37 years later.

Someone said – I forget who and, for once, Google has let me down – that no one should be allowed to be a writer until they reach 30. By 30 I'd just about given up writing. Oh, I'd been published, loads of times, but that stopped mattering to me and I hardly sent anything out and finally I stopped writing completely. And then I hit my mid-thirties and began writing novels. Who the hell knew there was a novelist in there? Certainly not me. And after two novels the poetry came back.

The point that guy (I think it was a guy) had to make is to do with life experience. If I can twist a scripture to my own ends: When I was a child I wrote as a child but when I became a man I wrote like a man. There are two things that contribute to someone becoming a half-decent writer: reading and living, and both take time. Add these to natural talent and you might just have a fighting chance of making it as a writer.

I'm not sure that this applies to the other arts. As one can see by Akiane's paintings, they stand up against the paintings of adults; you would never know that Mozart's Symphony No 1 had been written by a child (I have a copy so I can say for sure) although it is understandably derivative. Mind you if you're going to copy anyone then the Bachs are a good place to start.

Another prodigy I ran across was Mattie Stepanek who died recently at the age of 13; he suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy, dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy. He has been hailed not only as a poet but a peacemaker. Precociously intelligent from all accounts, he began writing poetry at age 3 to cope with the death of his brother. He had apparently written hundreds of poems by the time he was 6. Only time will tell if he will be remembered or not but I suspect his response to the events of September 2001 might just be. It's hard to say. So many artists responded to that event that his poem might just get lost in the fray.

FOR OUR WORLD – Written September 2001

We need to stop.
Just stop.
Stop for a moment…
Before anybody
Says or does anything
That may hurt anyone else.
We need to be silent.
Just silent.
Silent for a moment…
Before we forever lose
The blessing of songs
That grow in our hearts.
We need to notice.
Just notice.
Notice for a moment…
Before the future slips away
Into ashes and dust of humility.

                       Stop, be silent, and notice…
                       In so many ways, we are the same.
                       Our differences are unique treasures,
                       We have, we are, a mosaic of gifts
                       To nurture, to offer, to accept.
                       We need to be.
                       Just be.
                       Be for a moment…
                       Kind and gentle, innocent and trusting.
                       Like children and lambs.
                       Never judging or vengeful
                       Like the judging and vengeful.
                       And now, let us pray.
                       Differently, yet together,
                       Before there is no earth, no life,
                       No chance for peace.

After him I'm struggling. Why?

Prodigies tend to appear almost exclusively in "rule-based" fields like music, chess or mathematics. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited, likens child prodigies to computers: Both excel in symbol manipulation, but fail to impress when it comes to the fuzzier undertakings.

“Fields like literature require maturity and life experience,” he explains. “Prodigies, no matter how gifted, rarely possess the requisite emotional spectrum, an acquaintance with the nuances and subtleties of human relationships, or the accumulated knowledge that comes from first-hand exposure to the ups and downs of reality.”

Some scholars, however, have argued that brilliant young minds like H.P. Lovecraft (who composed long poems by age 5) and John Stuart Mill (who knew several dead languages by age 8) were indeed gifted enough to qualify as prodigies. But they are in the minority. – 'Whiz Kids', Forbes.com

So what do you think? Is there a poetic prodigy out there who could stand shoulder to shoulder – metaphorically speaking – with Eliot or Yeats or Heaney or even Kipling? I await you comments.

The Master and Margarita

When God created light, the first shadow was born – tagline to the film Shadow Builder

 

This is a very long review so for those of you reading this in your lunch hour let me cut to the chase. The Master and Margarita can be reasonably called the greatest novel to come out of Communist Russia, a work of magical realism, a pre-apocalyptic novel, a love story, a biting political satire or simply a damn good read if you can get over the fact that most of the names are thirty-odd characters long. But even that doesn't really cover it so there's no way in this review I can do this book justice. Oh, I can hurl superlatives at it but I won't have space to back them all up. To that end at the end of this post there will be links to numerous lengthy articles (I've been reading them for the past two days solid) which underscore much of what I'm about to say. It's the kind of book you'd expect a writer to produce after working on it for eleven years. It is a book every writer should read.

There are many levels to this book and numerous interpretations. The Master and Margarita was not, however, its original title; one of its working titles was Satan in Moscow[1] but even that is not an especially helpful title although it does set the scene. A more accurate, if unwieldy, title might have been The Master, the Master, the Master, the Master and Margarita because there are four main masters in this book, all with their own disciples. Here they are:

• the Master of the title, a historian who, when he wins a hundred-thousand rubles in a lottery connected to a state loan, quits his job to work on a book – we never learn his true name
  
  
• Jesus Christ (or Yeshua Ha-Nozri[2] as he is known in the book), a character in the Master's novel
  
  
• Pontius Pilate, the subject of the Master's novel, the Prefect (governor) of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36
  
  
• the devil who decides to visit Moscow in the 1930s in the guise of a professor called Woland, a character clearly reminiscent of Goethe's Mephistopheles and, to a lesser extent, perhaps Milton's Satan.

Some of the disciples are Margarita, the Master's lover; Matthew Levi, the only one of Jesus' followers to take an active role in the book although he's something of an amalgam of both the apostle and the evangelist; Banga, Pilate's faithful dog, the only creature who truly loves him and Woland's small entourage: Korovyev (also known as 'Fagot'), Behemoth[3], Azazello[4], Abadona[5] and the witch, Hella, who all serve as his proxies, an apparently typical Russian Orthodox representation of the devil.

Many of these characters have counterparts in the real world: for example, it is generally accepted that Woland represents Stalin (his parallel in the Master's book being Emperor Tiberius); Azazello is immediately recognizable as one of the chiefs of the secret police (his parallel in the Master's book is Afranius); the Master is based on Bulgakov himself – no prizes there – although he really stands for all the disenfranchised writers of the time and Margarita was inspired by his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, who actually put the finishing touches to the novel after Bulgakov's death in 1940 although one or two minor inconsistencies still exist.

This is not to say that these are the only significant characters, in fact the book opens with two key characters. Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov is a 23 year old poet who goes by the pseudonym 'Bezdomny', which means 'homeless' in Russian. Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch Berlioz is editor of "a fat literary journal" and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, MASSOLIT, a fictitious organisation that takes the place of the Union of Soviet Writers which, after 1934, one effectively had to be a member of in order to work as a writer.

Later in the novel MASSOLIT is attacked when Korovyev and Behemoth attempt to enter Massolit headquarters without identity cards:

"Your identification cards?" asked the citizeness in her turn.

"My lovely…" Korovyev began tenderly.

"I'm not lovely," the citizeness interrupted him.

"Oh, isn’t that a pity," said Korovyev, disenchanted, and continued: "Well, all right, if you don't wish to be lovely, which would have been most pleasant, you don't have to be. So then, to be satisfied that Dostoevsky is a writer, surely it's not necessary to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any of his novels, and you'll be satisfied without any identification card that you're dealing with a writer. I actually suspect that he didn't even have an identification card."

[…]

"You're not Dostoevsky," said the citizeness, knocked out of her stride by Korovyev.

"Well, who knows, who knows?" he replied.

"Dostoevsky is dead," said the citizeness, but not very confidently somehow.

"I protest!" exclaimed Behemoth heatedly. "Dostoevsky is immortal!"

The Master and Margarita had, as you can imagine, a hell of a time getting published in Russia, even after the death of Stalin, so it was quite an achievement when on 19^th December 2005 some 80 million Russians sat down to watch the first episode of an almost 10-hour long television adaptation of the novel which is more than tuned into The Ed Sullivan Show to watch The Beatles (73.3 million). That is astounding when you consider that most of the first episode consists of three blokes talking on a bench. In between that we have a couple of guys talking in a colonnade; the only real action takes place in the last few seconds – CSI it is not. The significance of this book to Russians cannot be minimised, especially to those who grew up in the former USSR; they understand the analogies, know who is symbolic of whom, and can relate to the emotions, motivations, and weaknesses of the characters.

Does this mean that if you are unfamiliar with Soviet history, Russian culture, or the fact that this is a satire you won't appreciate the book? The Master and Margarita has been described as Solzhenitsyn crossed with Lewis Carroll – now, are Carroll's Alice books simply children's stories or a satire on the ordered, earnest world of Victorian England? Bulgakov's novel works just fine as a plain ol' story with a beginning, middle and an end. When I first read it thirty years ago my knowledge of Russian history was sketchy at best and I treated it simply as a fantasy novel, in fact the blurb on the back of my copy, which I still own, has this quote:

The fantastic scenes are done with terrific verve and the nonsense is sometimes reminiscent of Lewis Carroll . . . on another level. Bulgakov's intentions are mystically serious. You need not catch them all to appreciate his great imaginative power and ingenuity. – Sunday Times

The key word here is 'fantastic' and what is interesting is that it is the supposed real world of 1930s Moscow that contains all the fantastical elements whereas the chapters set in Judea in the first century are presented as cold, hard facts: Bulgakov has turned everything on its head. Bulgakov's Yeshua Ha-Nozri is quite unlike the Jesus of the gospels, sometimes funny, sometimes cowardly, manipulative even – very human. The same can be said for Bulgakov's Woland. In that respect the cover of the latest translation by Hugh Aplin, published by Oneworld Classics, is misleading. This is not how the devil appears in the book, even at the end when he sheds his 'Woland' persona. He's certainly not evil incarnate in fact he seems more interested in making the lives of bad people more miserable rather than rewarding them for keeping the faith.

Bulgakov's Satan seeks out the essence of each individual life and sees to it that each is transformed into an eternal form of that essence. He is the embodiment of merciless truth, the kind of truth which does not allow for questions of mercy, compassion, or forgiveness. […] Like the artist, Satan discerns the essence of a life and transforms it into its pure form.[6]

He is actually capable of benevolence. He is far more subtle and sophisticated than the biblical Devil; "he acts more as a counterpart to God rather than his opponent."[7]

We get to meet Woland in the very first chapter of the novel. He is walking through the Patriarch's Ponds area of Moscow one hot evening in May (one might say 'devilishly hot') when he chances upon Bezdomny and Berlioz sitting on a bench engrossed in a heated discussion regarding the existence, historically at least, of Jesus Christ. Eyewitness accounts vary but the narrator of the novel describes the stranger as follows:

First of all: the person described did not limp on either leg, and was neither small nor enormous in stature, but simply tall. As far as his teeth are concerned, on the left side he had platinum crowns, and on the right gold ones. He wore an expensive grey suit and foreign shoes the same colour as the suit. He had his grey beret cocked jauntily over one ear, and under his arm he carried a walking stick with a black handle in the shape of a poodle's head. To look at, he was about forty plus. Mouth a bit crooked. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. The right eye black, the left for some reason green. Eyebrows black, but one higher than the other. In short – a foreigner.

Just before this Berlioz was witness to what he thought was a hallucination but what actually turned out to be a semi-transparent Korovyev which he describes as follows:

On his head a jockey's peaked cap, I little checked jacket, tight and airy too… A citizen almost seven feet tall, but narrow at the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and a physiognomy, I beg you to note, that was mocking.

"Well I'll be damned!" he exclaims. Now, that's the kind of thing we all say without thinking about it along with expressions like 'devilish business', 'the devil knows where', 'go to the devil' and 'what the devil for' – we never think twice about them but you start to notice these more and more in this book. Everyone calls on the devil. Why else would the devil appear? He was invited.

Woland's discussion with the two men focused on two areas, their atheism – and resultant belief that, assuming there is no God, they are somehow in control over their own destinies – and the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The latter he 'proves' by describing in detail the conversation between Jesus and Pilate prior to Jesus being sentenced saying that he had witnessed it personally; the former he proves by telling Berlioz that he would miss an appointment later in the day, that the professor intended staying in Berlioz's flat and finally by foretelling the manner of his death (that he would be beheaded by a woman) although this proof is lost on Berlioz, at least until later in the book. Slipping on spilled sunflower oil at the end of chapter three (which Woland had mentioned in passing in the first chapter), Berlioz falls onto the rails of an oncoming tram-car, which severs his head.

The question one needs to answer is: did the devil make that happen? I don't believe he did. He was simply at the right place, at the right time to relate what was just about to happen. Of note is the novel's epigraph, from Goethe's Faust:

"...so who are you in the end?"

"I am part of that power which eternally
desires evil and eternally works good."

How can Berlioz's death do anyone good? Well it starts a sequence of events that sends his companion into an asylum where he meets the Master who has been an inmate there for four months. This is an experience that ultimately changes the course of his life perhaps more than his encounter with Woland. As for Berlioz, we will meet him again later, in parts.

I mentioned that the Master winds up in an asylum. The breaking point for him has been an inability to get his novel about Pilate published. The editorial board reject it leaving the editorial secretary Lapshennikova, "a girl whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying", to inform him that the publisher already has sufficient material for two years ahead, and therefore the question of printing the novel, as she put it, "did not arise".

The final straw, however, is that, even though they have rejected his manuscript, members of the board – one in particular, the critic Latunsky – attack him in the press. The name Latunsky is probably a contraction of the names of two real critics, who were rather hostile to Bulgakov. The first one was Osaf Semenovich Litovsky who was the head of the Central Committee for Repertoires from 1930 to 1937, and who had coined the term Bulgakovism after the first performances of The Days of the Turbins. The second is the critic Alexander Robertovich Orlinsky, who preached resistance against Bulgakovism. In this respect the Master is not an especially heroic figure in the way he keels over, so easily it seems, after a bit of bad press. Bulgakov is much more of a hero. In the book's Appendix we have extracts from some of letters and diary entries:

Letter – 28^th March 1930 – A very long letter, to the Soviet Government asking once again whether he could either be expelled, or at least be permitted to find gainful employment in the theatrical world:

"…when I carried out an analysis of my albums of press cuttings, I discovered that there had been 301 references to me in the Soviet press during my ten years in the field of literature, of these, three were complimentary, 298 were hostile and abusive."

We don't get to meet Margarita Nikolaevna until 221 pages into the novel. She is oblivious to the Master's whereabouts or even if he's alive or dead; in fact all she has of him is a fragment of the manuscript which she has saved from being burned which she reads over and over to try and find some comfort in it. While sitting on one of the benches beneath the Kremlin she hears "the approaching beats of a drum and the sounds of trumpets, a little out of tune" – it's a funeral procession, the late Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch Berlioz's as it happens, sans head as it also happens though, of course, she could not be aware of that at the time. We’ll catch up with his head later.

Margarita's eyes followed the procession, and she listened to the doleful bass drum producing that same repeated "boom boom boom" as it faded into the distance, and she thought: "What a strange funeral! And how depressing that 'boom' is. Oh, I’d truly pawn my soul to the Devil just to find out if he's alive or not! I winder who that is they’re burying?" (italics mine)

She doesn't have to wait long for an answer. A "somewhat nasal male voice" from behind her tells her: "Berlioz, Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch . . . the chairman of MASSOLIT." This time it's not Woland, it's one of his retinue, Azazello with an offer. Yes, you've guessed it.

Of course, quite a bit has happened between Berlioz's death and his funeral the misappropriation of his head notwithstanding (16 chapters worth). This is just before you think the entire book consists of Russian citizens being propositioned on park benches. The thing that everyone has been talking about has been a performance at the variety theatre the night before where Woland had appeared onstage with two other members of his retinue, Korovyev and Behemoth (in the guise of a large black cat), who crop up as a double act several times in the book and leave a trail of havoc in the wake. The main treats that were in store for the theatre audience were the decapitation of the compère, the distribution of new clothes and the showering of the audience with ten ruble notes. The compère gets his head back (and winds up in the cell next to Ivan in the asylum), the clothes vanish on the way home (leaving most of the audience half-naked in the street) and the money turns into bits of paper the next day (causing a furore among the city's taxi drivers for a start).

All of this Margarita is aware of. So when Azazello says that "a perfectly harmless foreigner" who is aware of the whereabouts of the Master would like to meet her she puts two and two together and realises – well Azazello states it in so many words – that this is an opportunity she can exploit. Azazello provides Margarita with some cream with instructions to cover herself in it. Later that day at the hour on which she has been instructed to she smears the cream over her body, is transformed into a witch and, following further instructions from. Azazello, proceeds to fly naked on a broom to the river for a meeting with Woland only pausing to wreck the critic Latunsky's apartment.

What the devil does Woland want with her? Quite simply to be the hostess of the Spring Ball of the Full Moon[8] which takes place annually during Easter week. This she agrees to and this is where she finally gets to meet the rest of poor Berlioz:

The limping Woland stopped beside his raised area, and immediately Azazello was before him with a dish in his hands, and on that dish Margarita saw a man's severed head with the front teeth knocked out. The most complete silence continued to reign, and it was broken only by a bell, incomprehensible in these circumstances, which was heard once in the distance, as if from a front entrance.

"Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch," Woland addressed the head quietly, and then the eyelids of the man who had been killed were raised a little, and in the dead face Margarita saw with a shudder living eyes, full of thought and suffering. "Everything came true, didn't it?" Woland continued, gazing into the head's eyes. "Your head was cut off by a woman, the meeting didn't take place, and I'm staying in your apartment. That is fact. And fact is the most obstinate thing in the world. But now we're interested in what happens next, and not this already accomplished fact. You were always an ardent advocate of the theory that upon the severance of the head, life ceases in a man, he turns to ashes and departs into unbeing. It's pleasant for me to inform you, in the presence of my guests, although they actually serve of proof of a quite different theory, that your theory is both well-founded and witty. There is even one amongst them, whereby everyone will receive in accordance with his beliefs. Let it come to pass! You depart into unbeing, and I shall take joy in drinking to being from the goblet into which you turn.

At this point the skull shrivels up and is transformed into a goblet with a hinged lid. Berlioz has had his proof.

Berlioz is not the only person to meet his final end at the ball. The informer Baron Von Meigel is killed paralleling the murder of Yehudah[9], another informer, by Pilate during the feast of the Passover. Bulgakov here may have had in mind the assassination of Kirov in 1934 although this is conjecture. Suffice to say when the book was first published in 1966 this section was heavily censored.

After the ball Woland grants Margarita a wish. Interestingly she chooses to use this to end the suffering of one of the other guests at the ball rather than selfishly ask to be reunited with the Master and so Woland grants her a second wish specifically for herself; within moments the Master is returned to her and shortly thereafter the immolated manuscript is returned intact to him. "Manuscripts don't burn," Woland tells him, one of the book's key sentences.

In May 1926, Bulgakov's apartment was searched by the OGPU (precursor to the NKVD and KGB), and his diaries and the manuscript of the novel Heart of a Dog were confiscated. After repeated protests, they were returned to him. He burned the diaries, and never again kept another. Ironically, it was the OGPU that preserved the diaries for posterity, as they had made copies.

By 1929, all of Bulgakov's works had been banned. He compared his situation to "being buried alive."[10]

Anyway you would think that would tie everything up nicely but that's not the end of the story for the Master and Margarita, there's an interesting (and unexpected) coda. And you might have thought that we'd also seen the last of Pilate too but he appears again, no longer a character in a novel but a soul who has been trapped for nigh on two thousand years tormented in the moonlight: "Twenty-four thousand moons in penance for one moon long ago; isn't

that too much?" Margarita wants to know. Well we find out what happens to him. As for Moscow, yes, we find out too what happens in the weeks following and how the citizens cope with what they've been through by pure rationalisation. We also hear what happens to a few key characters like the poet Bezdomny who are honest enough to admit to what they've experienced. At the end of the book Woland and his retinue revert to their true forms and we see four of them on horseback fleeing the scene of their crimes; despite the fact they're all on black horses the nod to Revelation's four horsemen of the apocalypse is too tempting to miss. Although he never lived to see it, Bulgakov is calling time on Stalinism.

The book begins asking epistemological questions and it ends with one too when Woland asks Matthew Levi:

[W]hat would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?

Nothing is black and white in this life. The Master and Margarita is a funny book but it touches on very serious issues concerning human freedom and the nature of good and evil. Is evil all bad?

But there is still more, one final question that we are left to ponder. In chapter 13 the Master tells Ivan that he knew what the last words of his novel about Pilate would be, "The fifth Procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate," and these coincidentally are the final words of The Master and Margarita suggesting that the novel the Master actually wrote is the one we have just read, a work of metafiction on top of everything else.

Reading back on this I have to confess what a poor job I have done trying to convey the full depth of this novel. Books have been written about it and rightly so. What is so impressive about the book is that all the cleverness is a bonus. A lot of clever books are simply not very reader-friendly and apart from the long names (which you simply have to learn to cope with if you want to read any great Russian literature) it is a carefully-plotted, well-written page-turner. It can be a bit wordy at times but that's a style thing. Don't try and read the book in one sitting and you'll probably be all right. And, did I mention, it's also very funny?

Let me leave you with the first episode of that Russian adaptation covering the first three chapters of the book. The physical descriptions are a bit off but the dialogue is very accurate.

***

There is a ton of material on this book online. So here's some further reading you might like to have a look at:

The complete novel online - 1967 translation – by Michael Glenny

The complete novel online – 1997 translation – by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The Master and Margarita – nice one-page summary with a lot of interesting discussion questions

The Master and Margarita website – a very comprehensive site indeed which include a page of links to essays online

A Duet In Three Movements: Bulgakov -- Olesha – Bulgakov

Naming things that aren’t: Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita

Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: Why Can’t Critics Agree on What it Means?

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: the true content

Sympathy for the Devil – a 3-part article which includes a lot of personal recollections about the book from the likes of Roman Polanski who tried to get Warner Bros to make a film of the book

***

This new translation is available from Oneworld Classics priced at £8.99. As always with this publisher this is a nice edition on good paper supplemented by notes from the translator, a short biography and even a few black and white photographs.

 

REFERENCES

---

[1] Other early titles were The Black Magician (1929), The Prince of Darkness (1930) and The Great Chancellor (1934).

[2] Yeshua Ha-Nozri means Jesus of Nazareth in Aramaic

[3] A large biblical creature mentioned in the Book of Job, 40:15-24

[4] In the Old Testament apocryphal Book of Enoch 8:1-3, Azazel is the fallen angel who taught people to make weapons and jewellery

[5] In the Old Testament, Abaddon comes to mean "place of destruction," or the realm of the dead, and is associated with Sheol (see, for instance, Job 26:6, Proverbs 15:11, Proverbs 27:20 and Psalm 88:3, among others)

[6] Carol Arenberg, Mythic and Daimonic Paradigms in Bulgakov's Master i Margarita

[7] Marc Neininger, The Gnostic devil in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita

[8] This sun and its light, and the moon and its, are constantly present throughout the novel, in the "Moscow" chapters as well as in the "Bible" chapters.

[9] Judas Iscariot

[10] Mia Taylor, Sympathy for the Devil

Memories of Spike (part two)

If you missed Part one you can find it here.

Radio

---

During the Second World War Spike served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery, as Gunner Milligan, 954024. He rose to the rank of Lance Bombardier and was about to be promoted to Bombardier when he was wounded in action in Italy. Subsequently hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan 'Jumbo' Jenkins) back to Gunner.

After his hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called The Bill Hall Trio in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan stayed on in Italy playing with the Trio but returned to England soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays that displayed many of the key elements of what would later become The Goon Show.

Milligan's professional entertainment career (after being demobbed) was on the radio. He appeared in – but more importantly wrote for a number of shows. His big break came in 1951 when he got the opportunity to write for a new show originally cowering under the unwieldy title Crazy People, featuring Radio's own Crazy Gang - "The Goons" subsequently truncated to simply The Goon Show.

Broadly speaking the Goons engaged in 'sound cartooning'. The kind of things that you would expect in a Tex Avery cartoon would happen on the show, holes could be picked up and carried to where needed and doors drawn on walls would open afterwards. The Wikipedia entry on The Goons is quite detailed and I would recommend you read the section on Surrealism. As a lead in to my favourite sketch I'll reproduce the section on transference of time:

If time causes calendars, calendars can cause time. If you drop a bundle of 1918 calendars on German troops in 1916, then they will all go home, thus shortening the war. (World War One (aka!), 22nd episode/ 8th series.) Two other shows with extreme examples of time transference are The Treasure in the Tower, 5th episode/8th series; and The Mysterious Punch Up the Conker, 19th episode / 7th series. (The famous 'What time is it Eccles?' scene.)

It was a huge success with the fans but not with the powers that be. From 1952 to 1956 alone, the producer, Peter Eton, faced thirty separate attempts from within the BBC to have the show taken off the air. Why?

Secombe, Bentine, Milligan and Sellers

Although The Goon Show did not deal explicitly in political satire, it was widely regarded at the time as subversive, both by the BBC hierarchy and the chief scriptwriter, Milligan. Among the prime objects of Goon humour were authority figures and officialdom generally, and the show specialised in sending up a whole host of hallowed British institutions. Privilege, patriotism, the parliament, the military and the Empire were all frequently lampooned. – Stuart Ward, British culture and the end of empire, p94

One has simply to look back on Milligan's life to see where all of that came from. Don't let the Irish-sounding name fool you, Spike was actually born in India, the son of a working-class military family in the dying days of the British Raj; he was fifteen before he returned to England, to Catford specifically, a stark contrast to India, and then a few years later he was off to war. He has said in so many words:

If all my youth had been spent in Catford, there would have been no Goon Show. . . I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but I had had enough of the British Empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call ‘Sir’. Colonels. Chaps . . . with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels.

Really what Milligan was doing was taking the anarchic comedy of the Marx Brothers and giving it his own peculiarly British twist. This is not to belittle him as an innovator but simply to point out that everyone builds on what has gone before; they develop it or react against it and Milligan did a bit of both.

When he began writing for the BBC, British radio was very mannered and polite and its shows were driven by catchphrases, as was the case the many music hall routines. The Goons maintained this tradition at least, one of the most popular being Little Jim's only line in most episodes (voiced by Milligan) where he simply exclaims: "He's fallen in the wah-taa!" Wikipedia has a section on The Goon Show running jokes here. Catchphrases from The Goon Show form the longest index entry in the 2002 publication of The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases.

Just as in a cartoon there are loose rules that exist in the gooniverse. Broadly speaking they're rules of convenience and conventional logic does not apply. To my mind the best example of this is the 'What Time is it, Eccles?' sketch from the Goon Show episode 'Mysterious Punch-up of the Conker'. The voices are Spike Milligan (Eccles – an amiable, well-meaning man with no wits or understanding) and Peter Sellers (Bluebottle – a young, lustful boy scout with a squeaky voice who normally gets blown up in each episode – shades of Kenny from South Park there):

Bluebottle:	What time is it Eccles?
Eccles:	Err, just a minute. I, I've got it written down 'ere on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning.
Bluebottle:	Ooooh, then why do you carry it around with you Eccles?
Eccles:	Well, umm, if a anybody asks me the ti-ime, I ca-can show it to dem.
Bluebottle:	Wait a minute Eccles, my good man...
Eccles:	What is it fellow?
Bluebottle:	It's writted on this bit of paper, what is eight o'clock, is writted.
Eccles:	I know that my good fellow. That's right, um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o'clock.
Bluebottle:	Well then. Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn't eight o'clock?
Eccles:	Ah, den I don't show it to dem.
Bluebottle:	Ooohhh
Eccles:	[Smacks lips] Yeah.
Bluebottle:	Well how do you know when it's eight o'clock?
Eccles:	I've got it written down on a piece of paper!
Bluebottle:	Oh, I wish I could afford a piece of paper with the time written on.
Eccles:	Oohhhh
Bluebottle:	'Ere Eccles?
Eccles:	Yah
Bluebottle:	Let me hold that piece of paper to my ear would you? - 'Ere. This piece of paper ain't goin'.
Eccles:	What? I've been sold a forgery!
Bluebottle:	No wonder it's stopped at eight o'clock.
Eccles:	Oh dear.
Bluebottle:	You should get one of them tings my grandad's got.
Eccles:	Oooohhh?
Bluebottle:	His firm give it to him when he retired.
Eccles:	Oooohhh
Bluebottle:	It's one of dem tings what it is that wakes you up at eight o'clock, boils the kettil, and pours a cuppa tea.
Eccles:	Ohhh yeah! What's it called? Um...
Bluebottle:	My granma.
Eccles:	Ohh... Ohh, ah wait a minute. How does she know when it's eight o'clock?
Bluebottle:	She's got it written down on a piece of paper!

Now, it's funny on paper. But it's hysterical live:

Years later this inspired a poem:

Twelve O'Clock, Union City


(for Spike Milligan)


I wanted the time
so a nice woman
wrote it down for me.

It was eight o'clock
and it was true then
and twice a day it

becomes true again
but then it isn't
so true anymore.

What goes round comes round.


9th May 1997

The Prince of Wales was a huge fan of The Goons (he even made his own Goon-esque skits) so either the show didn't live up to biting social satire that Milligan claimed he was aiming for, or Charles just didn't get the joke. Milligan caused a bit of a kerfuffle by calling him a "grovelling little bastard" on television in 1994 when he received the British Comedy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Milligan later faxed him, saying: "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question?" A knighthood (honorary because of his Irish citizenship) was finally awarded in 2000.

Poetry

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Milligan wrote nonsense verse for children, the best of which is comparable with that of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and (while depressed) serious poetry. His most famous poem, On the Ning Nang Nong, was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll:

<On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

This is not the poem that I remember best, however. It is a simple four-liner called 'Rain':

Rain

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin.

While still at school I parodied this poem:

The Irish

There are holes in their heads
Where their brains get in
But they're ever so small
That's why they are dim.

Spike was not beyond a parody himself:

I must go down to the sea again

I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky;
I left my shoes and socks there -
I wonder if they're dry?

Or just taking the mickey:

A Silly Poem

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Although best known for his nonsense poetry, Spike also wrote serious poetry. You can listen to him read some of his poems about depression here. But here are a couple of gentler pieces.

Love Song

If I could write words
Like leaves on an Autumn Forest floor
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water
You would drown when I said
‘I love you’.

When I Suspected

There will be a time when it will end.
Be it parting
Be it death
So each passing minute with you
            Pendulummed with sadness.
So many times
I looked long into your face.
            I could hear the clock ticking.

Film

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Probably Milligan's best known film role was an accident. While the Pythons were filming The Life of Brian it just so happened that Milligan was on holiday in Tunisia where the filming was taking place – he was visiting his old World War II battlefields. The Pythons were alerted to this one morning and he was promptly included in the scene that just happened to be being filmed.

In an interview in Australia he remembers the occasion:

Do you know what they never told me? They said, 'we want you to make up a speech to the followers of the slipper, a Biblical little speech to these people, with your back to them'. And so I said.

Surely they that goeth away do not seek the sun, they that cometh unto us do wee the serpent, and the apple of eel. We that go, therefore, wherefore, and though shall see, therefore, and thou shall cometh again. Surely as the day is red ...

I went on talking this shit, all the while, they're being told to move away. So when I turned, there was nobody there. They hadn't told me. That's why I walked sideways off the screen. – 'I think I caught up' with Spike Milligan, Union Recorder, v75 no 5

He disappeared again in the afternoon before he could be included in any of the close-up or publicity shots for the film.

After The Life of Brian, the main film that I associate Milligan with is The Bed-Sitting Room which he wrote along with John Antrobus. It started off as a one-act play which was adapted to a longer play in 1963 revived in 1967 and finally filmed in 1970 featuring such luminaries of the day as Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Hordern, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe and Milligan himself.

One critic memorably described it as being "like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes".

The play is set in a post-apocalyptic London, nine months after World War III ("the Nuclear Misunderstanding"), which lasted for two minutes and twenty eight seconds – "including the signing of the peace treaty". Anyone who has read my novel, Stranger than Fiction, will recognise my nod to Milligan there.

Michael Coveney describes it as:

a Cold War farce three years after "the next war", a ragbag of sketches, visual jokes and satirical barbs limed in a premonition of radiation-infused doom which climaxed in a cannibalistic ritual and, literally, the last dance, the extermination waltz. – The Independent, 23 June 2009

The whole Independent article is worth a read because it details Milligan's pretty much forgotten stage career, something I knew next to nothing of.

Here's the first ten minutes of the film. You'll note that the credits are in order of height.

One other point of note. If anyone is interested in what Jonathan Payne (the hero of my first two novels) looks like then take note of the short, bald man in the underground train; that's Arthur Lowe and he was the model for Jonathan.

This, of course, was not the only time we see Milligan on screen. Most people would assume his first screen role would have been in 1952's commercial flop Down Among the Z Men which drew heavily on his work for the Goons and in fact starred all four of the original members, but there were two appearances before this, in 1951, in Let's Go Crazy and Penny Points to Paradise along with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe.

The only film I'm aware of in which he was involved as a writer – as opposed to an ad-libber – was The Great McGonagall, which featured Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria although he did 'write', and feature in, the sixth segment of The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, 'Sloth' which is a series of silent film clips showing people not being active. I seem to recall his part involved him standing under a tree with his hands in his pockets waiting for an apple to drop.

Health

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Spike had his first major nervous breakdown in late 1951 (just after the start of Series 3 of The Goon Show) and spent two months in hospital. The pressure of writing the shows is given as a major contributing reason for the breakdown and the break-up of his first marriage. He was eventually diagnosed with manic depression as it was known then (bipolar disorder) and battled it for the rest of his life.

On one occasion, Peter Sellers had to lock his door against a knife-wielding Milligan; on another, Sellers and Harry Secombe broke into Milligan's dressing room, fearing he was suicidal. Over the years he did in fact attempt suicide. Eventually lithium was found to be the most effective treatment. He suffered from bipolar disorder for most of his life, having at least ten mental breakdowns. He was hospitalised more than once. His major coping strategy for this seems to have been his endlessly prolific writing which he states he absolutely had no choice but to do in order to extricate himself from the terrible blacknesses he fell into. Eventually, in 1994, he collaborated with Anthony Clare and they brought out a book, Depression and How to Survive It.

Summary

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Reading back over all of this I feel it is such a cursory portrayal of the man. I've mentioned nothing of his infidelities, his large family, his work for animal rights or his charity work. For a man who started his career late in life (he was 33) he achieved so much. In trawling through the Net looking for stuff to include here I discovered for example that from the 1960s onwards Spike was a regular correspondent with the writer Robert Graves. Milligan's letters to Graves usually addressed a question to do with classical studies. Now, I would never have imagined that. Nor would I have imagined him being passionate about archaeology but it seems he was.

What I can say is that my life has been indelibly marked by its contact with him. Like all my heroes he wasn't perfect. He had a bad temper. He even shot a boy with an airgun for coming onto his property once. But then who's perfect? Language was never the same for me after him. He was every bit as important in my development as a writer as Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams were.

He was a professional amateur, a dabbler; he was having too much fun to treat what he was doing too seriously and so there are rough edges everywhere with him but that is a part of his charm. He had no airs and graces. And when he died the papers gave him the most coverage anyone had had since the death of Winston Churchill. If you've enjoyed anything I've touched on here I would heartily recommend you follow up. At the very least treat yourself to a copy of Puckoon.