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From Scenes Like These

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From Scenes Like These

The novelist in Gordon Williams, who died a year ago today, fed off the journalist. Many of his novels were founded on his own real–life experiences.

From Scenes Like These  — post-war rural Scotland (tick), The Camp — RAF conscripts at a base in West Germany (tick), The Upper Pleasure Gardens — local journalism (tick); and it goes on:  Big Morning Blues (Soho noir) and Walk Don’t Walk  — author tour of America.

Even such an  unlikely candidate as Straw Dogs, had a factual inspiration….. and his first book, the Last Day of Lincoln Charles, was actually based on a story he covered for a weekly features magazine — in real life it is USAF airman Napoleon Green who runs amok, kills people, and is hunted to his death in seaside Britain.

It actually happened on Broadstairs beach in the summer of 1955: four dead, seven wounded.  Maybe Britain’s first serial shooter…. and yet completely forgotten today. But testament to Williams ability to spot interesting stories and run with them. It was a talent he brought to bear on SCENE magazine —  a short-lived  events/arts/film/music magazine that Williams worked on …… a Peter Cook venture that also had Tom Stoppard as the drama critic. It was where, according to Williams,  Stoppard worked on an early draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Few copies of SCENE survive today …..but Williams’s articles present a writer standing on the edge of an emerging pop world, aware of the hype even before most people were aware of the phenomenon  (see his astringent review around the same time of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday). So we begin this look back at Williams work with some of his work on SCENE magazine.

As a taster of his style here is his intro to an article  from November 1962 on Mark Wynter… a pop singer who had 2 top-ten hits that year with ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’ and ‘Go Away Little Girl’.

‘Mr Andrew Oldham rang up to say that he was taking over Mark Wynters publicity. Mr Oldham said that Mr Wynter was not like other pop stars. Mr Oldham said that Mr Wynter was suitable for a story with depth.

Mr Oldham turned out to be a freshfaced 18-year-old with an unparted mass of  ginger hair and tight corduroy trousers with flared bottoms.’

Yes, that was Andrew Loog Oldham — the Rolling Stones contract the would make him their manager, was still a year away.

 

South Riding: the prescience of Winifred Holtby

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Winfred Holtby set the book  between the wars in the mythical South Riding of Yorkshire. Except she didn’t. It was published in 1936 – the only war she knew was the Great War.  And far from being mythical – the South Riding is based on real towns in Yorkshire, and real events in the East Riding (of which her mother was an alderman).  So it is fiction very strongly grounded in the reality of its times: women’s rights, the great depression, the lovers and husbands killed in the war; and the left versus fascism.

There is a minor character in the book – Ernst – a young Communist.

‘Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth’

Holtby was writing this in 1935 – it was the next line that made me go back and check the date:

‘Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess … Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachau concentration camp’.

That is prescient. Dachau’s infamy was still at an early stage. Many would not even have heard of it – including the original sub editors at Collins, who  delivered the whole 600 page book with scarcely a mistake. But they did miss one typo. In the original 1936 edition the line reads:

‘ … who had… been beaten to death in Dachan concentration camp.’

A glaring mistake today – but not in 1936. Winfred Holtby would have spotted it – but she died a few months before the proofs were ready.

 

 

 

 

Gordon Williams 1934-2017: A Life in Books

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Gordon Williams was a jack of all trades and a master of some. Will his reputation survive his death?

Did he have one in his lifetime – is a better question. He was a journalist, an admired literary writer (Booker short-listed), a successful hack writer (9 days to write his most famous book), a children’s author (Micronauts) and a scriptwriter, a tv presenter (fired) and an originator of a tv series and a writer of film adaptations ( The Duellists).

He rubbed shoulders with most of the literary scene and traded punches with a few of them. In the 1960s he was one of a  handful of authors actually paid to write books full time.  Several of his books were optioned – and two made it into movies.

So — part of the professional literary establishment then, but without ever really being in it.  True he worked alongside Tom Stoppard for a while (on Peter Cook’s short-lived SCENE magazine ) and went head to head with Iris Murdoch for the first Booker prize (guess who won?)* but he was (more than) equally at home working with Bobby Moore (autobiography) or Terry Venables (Hazel series) or handling PR for Acker Bilk while dishing out advice to a very young Andrew Loog Oldham.

There is no readily discernible arc to Williams’ life story. No young meteor blazing a predictable trail through the literary heavens. It’s more a firework display…. flashes of illumination with no easy way to know what his next flash of inspiration would reveal or where it would come from. Until you remember he was a journalist, with a voracious not to say a ferocious eye for detail. And once you know where he was grounded, where his journalistic instincts were unleashed, then the confusing medley of Williams output starts to make sense.

Yes, as a lad he helped out on a farm in post-war rural Ayrshire (From Scene Like These), was stationed in Germany under a deranged martinet commander (The Camp), worked as a local journalist (The Upper Pleasure Gardens), and was a denizen of the back streets of Soho in the late 1960s (Big Morning Blues). Most of the events in Big Morning Blues actually happened (though not to him). And Walk Don’t Walk was about an author’s book-selling tour of America . Even Straw Dogs (of which more later) and The Duellists benefited from his journalist instincts.  Brought in for the latter to write the book of the film he asked a basic journo’s question nobody seemed able to answer ‘Why are they duelling?’.

His very first book: The Last Day of Lincoln Charles was about a US airman who went berserk and ended up getting gunned down on Broadstairs beach. Improbable, but like so much of Williams’ work, actually true.

Williams later work includes the very polished Pomeroy about a raffish US special agent in La Belle Epoque London of the early 20th century. It has a lot going for it, apart from sales. Maybe if Gordon Williams had actually lived in that era.. .

The other late work of interest is Straw Dogs II: the revenge. Williams had the concept, the twists and the plotting  all sorted. In his head. It was an obvious sequel, with the strong possibility of film money (they are still doing remakes of Straw Dogs 1). But it was also predictable. And he didn’t do predictable.

 

 

*Gordon Williams told me he had heard it was tight-run thing between From Scenes Like These and The Nice and the Good (Iris Murdoch). In the end P H Newby won it, and no –I hadn’t heard of him either (ran the Third Programme, wrote lots of books.

 

 

 

 

 

Lionel Davidson: the best spy novelist you might never have read

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…. is how the Daily Telegraph kicked off its review of Kolymsky Heights which has recently been reissued by Faber. The Telegraph reviewer, Jake Kerridge speculates on why Davidson is almost forgotten today.

‘But despite his being a bestseller as well as a darling of the critics, he has faded from view. Perhaps he was simply too original: there is something in the view that the most popular thrillers offer surprises and shocks of an entirely predictable kind.’

His early novels, The Red Rose of Tibet and his crime novels are getting noticed too, but his children’s books still slip under the radar. Or rather Under Plum Lake does, the only children’s book he wrote under his own name. The charge ‘too original’ could also be levelled at Under Plum Lake. We thinks its rather special, but then we would as we publish it. Still with Philip Pullman writing the introduction to Heights it can only be a matter of time…

 

An Englishman’s duty by Herr Hermann Hueffer

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Ford Madox Ford started life as as Ford Hermann Hueffer, named in honour of his grandfather, Johann Hermann Hueffer. Who better to understand the qualities required to be an Englishman?

 ‘An Englishman’s duty is to secure for himself for ever, reasonable clothing, a clean shirt a day, a couple of mutton chops grilled without condiments, two floury potatoes, an apple pie with a piece of Stilton and pulled bread, a pint of Club médoc, a clean room, in the winter a good fire in the grate, a comfortable armchair, a comfortable woman to see that all these were prepared for you, and to keep you warm in bed and to brush your bowler and fold your umbrella in the morning.’

Such a well-regulated lifestyle sounds both dull and a bit fanciful at the same time. However, half a century later the Lord Lucan visited the Claremont Club every weekday for a luncheon of grilled chops. Admittedly his routine fell apart after he attempted to murder his wife, killing his nanny Sandra Rivett instead. Defenders of Ford’s analysis could point to the fact that Lord Lucan was actually a member of the Irish peerage, and therefore not a proper English gentleman.

Ford’s observations on the English upper(ish) classes are both entertaining and illuminating. Although circulating among them, he was not of them, being an outsider in so many ways (half German and completely skint most of the time).

‘English people of good class do not dress for dinner on Sundays. That is a politeness to God because theoretically you attend evening service and you do not go to church in the country in evening dress. As a matter of fact you never go to evening service — but it is complimentary to suggest by your dress that you might be visited by the impulse.’

Morals too had to be viewed in a certain light:

‘People with titles and great possessions are vastly more difficult to decry than impoverished commoners, because the scale of morality changes. Titles and great possessions expose you to great temptations — you may be excused if you succumb. It is scandalous, on the other hand, that the indigent should have any fun!’

And, as for promiscuity — well Ford’s views on that were more nuanced than one might expect:

‘A constant change of partners was a social nuisance; you could not tell whether you could or couldn’t invite a couple together to a tea-fight. And society existed for social functions. That was why promiscuity was no good. For social functions you had, to have an equal number of men and women or someone got left out of conversations and so you had to know who, officially in the social sense, went with whom. ‘

This from a man pursued by women who wanted to be known as Mrs Heuffer. Indeed Violet Hunt faced court charges for calling herself Mrs Heuffer. Ford did eventually change his surname to Ford, and many biographies tell you that it was prompted by the First World War and a desire to distance himself from his German heritage. It seems equally likely that with a new mistress (Stella Bowen) he felt like a new name. And yes, Stella soon called herself Mrs Ford.

Ford might have avoided so much name-change angst and also rows with previous lovers, if he had just married a few more of his partners. But Ford has a view on this too:

‘A man as a rule does not marry his mistress whilst he has any kick in him.’

All quotes from Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End, reinkarnation

 

Parade’s End: The American Connection

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Quite what the American HBO audience will make of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is hard to know.  American connections are few and far between; although Adelaide Clemens who plays suffragette  Valentine Wannop  was in deepest Louisiana filming a horror flick when the script arrived. However, she is Australian, so that doesn’t really count. In fact there is a Deep South connection, but more on that later.

The hero Christopher Tietjens, who is played by the very English Benedict Cumberbatch, espouses a set of  values that was old fashioned a 100 years ago.  And his fearsome unbelieveably vindictive wife Sylvia would have been just that — unbelievable — were it not for Rebecca Hall’s deftly  distracting performance. That and the fact playwright Tom Stoppard manages to subtly soften some of her harder edges.

Plot lines don’t follow the conventional trajectory, motives are blurred, and resolutions don’t always resolve. This is true to the books, although Stoppard will occasionally drop in a scene that succinctly  ties up a lot of loose ends before the characters are pointed in new directions and move on. These scenes are not in the books, but must have been judged necessary for the tv viewer.

Some of Stoppard’s good work is undermined by the ending (plot-spoiler reassurance: no revelations on the way). Trilogies end after book 3 (the original BBC adaptation half a century ago was a 3-parter). Tetralogies end after book 4 (many critics believe book 4 is an integral part of Parade’s End). The BBC, 2012 version,  ends around book 3.1. So a bit of the last book (titled Last Post in the UK) makes it, most doesn’t.

But in doing this, Stoppard has conjured an ending that doesn’t really exist in the original books. Perhaps this is inevitable when trying to affix an ending to Ford’s shifting perspectives; the very act of pulling threads together undermines the author’s original intentions. This indeed was the charge Graham Greene levelled at Last Post – it cleared up ‘valuable ambiguities’, and so he ditched it from his edition of Parade’s End. But for readers/viewers wanting to know ‘what happened next’ Last Post still has a role to play.

But any US viewers seeking a greater clarity of ending, and some American connection, should be pointed in the direction of the first BBC series (1964). Not only was it a straight forward 3-parter in black and white, but the role of the scarlet woman – Sylvia Tietjens- was played by an American, Jeanne Moody. Better known across the Atlantic as Miss Alabama 1951.

Note. The Parade’s End  books in order of appearance: Some Do Not … , No More Parades , A Man Could Stand Up — , Last Post.

 

Tom Stoppard on Ford Madox Ford

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If you missed the BBC’s latest adaptation (they did an earlier one with Judi Dench in the 1960s) of  Parade’s End  it is still easy to find. But read the book first. Rather than being a spoiler, it sets the viewer up for more intrigue. As in: how is the scriptwriter going to handle that? Characters spend more time thinking about their relationship than actually having one, over years and years. One solution would be to cut numerous scenes shorter and shorter. Stoppard’s solution was actually to insert new ones, as he explained to Victoria Glendinning *:

” …  I had to invent scenes for the characters to tell each other things which in the novels are thought privately.” Ford’s story is not chronological. “I have made it linear, fair enough, but we hope and believe that it still has the smell of modernism. The book is quirky, the characters don’t make sense, it wrong-foots the reader about the judgments one makes about any particular character. There is a complementary feeling in Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’—a masterpiece too, and there too the moral standing of the characters is refracted through their ambiguities.”

*Interview with Victoria Glendinning in http://moreintelligentlife.co.uk

Ford Madox World: belle epoque and before

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Amongst the many confusing things about Parade’s End – the steam of consciousness, the ambiguities, the time jumps – is that for the modern reader the action harks back to a bygone period just before the Great War, while for the main protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, the belle epoque is the future, and much to be lamented. He was not impressed by  20th-century  or even 19th-century values.

“By God!” Christopher exclaimed. “I loathe your whole beastly buttered-toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort …”

So if  that ‘new’ era was what Christopher Tietjens was against, what was he for?  Ford Madox Ford tries to explain, in a single sentence:

“Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval, good-humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter’s lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. “

Ford Madox Ford Word

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This weeks Ford Madox Word is ‘atrabilarian’. What does it mean and give an example of its use.

Ford is an example of an ‘expand your vocabulary ‘ course all on his own. How about ‘matutinal’. Or springald? Cachinnating? This is how Ford uses it in Parade’s End:  ” just the thing to send laughter raging like fire through a cachinnating army.” Fine. Where it gets tricky is when he uses words you do understand readily, but aren’t sure whether you would have made the effort. Like ‘beanfeastishness’. Not content with this strange beast, Ford further expands it (how?). We will try an unravel Ford’s predeliction for ever-compounding his words later. Ford’s answer to this question might be that is ‘un-unravellable’ (Parade’s End again).

Meanwhile, here is one more mainstream Ford Madox Word:’boskage’.

The race to South Riding: Winifred Holtby or Ford Madox Ford?

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Who got there first?

The fictional South Riding of Yorkshire is so associated with Winfred Holtby it is seen as her invention. Yet Ford Madox Ford cited the South Riding in Parade’s End, years before Holtby.

For Holtby the real East Riding was too close to home. Her mother was its first female alderman, Holtby lived there for a while, and the shenanigans of East Riding council provided much of the story line for South Riding. So the South Riding did a good job for Holtby —  though not quite good enough to avoid a rift with her mother.
For Ford the phrase illuminates a single sentence:
‘The mother an admirable woman, but from the South Riding. Soft, therefore, and ample.’
In Parade’s End (and possibly elsewhere) Yorkshire folk regard southerners as softies. A soft Yorkshireman (or woman) therefore, almost by definition, had to come from the South Riding. It’s a neat and succinct description from Ford. Worth inventing a whole county for. But did he? In A Mirror to France  Ford wrote
‘… most of the country from La Manche to the South Riding of Yorkshire is really France’
Thus raising the possibility that Ford simple got it wrong. He didn’t realise there was no South Riding. With most authors one could immediately dismiss this notion but with Ford – whose grip on ‘facts’ could be tenuous – the possibility remains open. Ford, whose Parade’s End is full of ‘valuable ambiguities (to use Graham Greene’s phrase) has contrived to leave us with one more.

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