Banville and Schlink: key novels

THE SEA, THE READER: unfulfilling holiday fodder.

RECENTLY I have read the necessary books for school, and amidst the usual to and fro of events at home have squeezed in two well known novels whilst listening to the wild cockatoos screeching in trees in Torquay at night.

I enjoyed the first half of THE SEA (JOHN BANVILLE).  I became involved in the mysteries surrounding the past lives of artist Max Morden, and his shifting erotic affections for his friend Chloe’s mother Connie, and later the family’s nursemaid, Rose. And he, remembering momentous events of the past, and helping to revive those memories, driving back in middle age, to the place these events occurred. The first half of the novel is mostly driven by Max’s interest in Connie and his developing awareness of her family. The second half, and less successful for me, was about Chloe who Max develops an interest for, and her mute brother, Myles. Meanwhile Max’s wife Anna dies (she is discussed obviously as part of Max’s adulthood), and Banville takes us back to Max’s childhood again in which Chloe and Myles both drown.

John Banville has an extraordinary vocabulary, and many interesting words are littered throughout his novel. This is just an example of the ‘c’ words:

caducous: adj. falling off easily or before the usual time
catafalque: n. an ornamental structure sometimes used in funerals for the lying in state of the body
cerement: n. a shroud for the dead
cinereal: adj. resembling or consisting of ashes
congeries: n.pl. aggregation, collection
costive: adj. affected by constipation; slow in action or expression
crapulent: adj. relating to the drinking of alcohol or drunkennesscraquelure: n. network of fine cracks found on the surface of some oil paintings

crepitant: adj. having or making a crackling sound

 

I have a similar experience when I read books by Zoe Heller. She also chooses her words thoughtfully and imaginatively. However with Zoe Heller there seems to be a lovely flow to her unusual words. Banville’s words I found off putting, like he seemed to be showing off. Perhaps there were too many clever words and it came across to me as self conscious.

 

The main bit in the denouement involves the drowning of the children. By this point I had become a bit tired of the novel. The current occupants of the lodging house called the ‘Cedars’ that Max has returned to are an ex-army Colonel and a house maid, linked to the catastrophic events many years before, but uninteresting. The slow death of Max‘s wife is also drawn out.

The Sea is beautifully written, however the narrative chopped and changed too much for me and I found the new characters in the second half of the book less compelling . An interesting concept though- to revisit the place of your youth in which momentous events occurred.  Something terribly sad about the idea as well.

THE READER (BERNARD SCHLINK) brought to me even less satisfaction. A few big jumps in time but no flashbacks. Like The Sea, it is written in first person by a male narrator, Michael Berg. This novel, too, deals with the erotic thoughts of a young man (he is 15 at the start)  and a considerably older woman. These erotic fantasies are much more fulfilled. The love interest is the enigmatic Hanna, who suddenly disappears at one point and re-emerges as a defendant in a Nazi war crime trial, for which she is found guilty. Hanna was a very blurry character for me, and dissatisfying. She liked to use the expression ‘kid’ in reference to the narrator a lot, and said little else, and I found her unconvincing. She was a tram conductress before the trial, and spent the rest of her life in prison thereafter. The epiphany she experiences whilst inside was interesting but I found myself not caring in any particular way for her.

A key question imposed by the novel is in regards to the level of culpability we should inflict on those who followed the orders of the SS in Germany during the Second World War. Hanna and the other German officers allowed a large group of Jewish prisoners to burn to death in a church that has been bombed. They should have opened the doors and let them out. Hanna’s involvement is complex because she harbours a secret that implicates her in crimes  she may have otherwise been not guilty of. Her extended time in prison therefore is a tragedy, however Michael unfailingly tries to keep her spirit alive by sending tapes to her.

We see the preparedness of the SS guards to let the 300 Jewish women burn as heinous and insufferable. For me there are many Holocaust stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that are far more compelling. Hanna was not an evil character, and I found myself wondering if Bernard Schlink wanted us to empathise with Hanna.  At the end of the story, perhaps, but perhaps not in the course of the events that took place in the war. The ability to forgive is always important and powerful, not to mention healthy. The film ‘Dead Man Walking’ deals with this concept powerfully. And the Australian film called The Father, with an elderly and brilliant Max Von Sydow, deals with similar themes to those that appear in The Reader.

'Never a warm leaf to unfold': Lawrence and the impact of the Great War

NOW  I have read a few little novellas, first published in 1923 together in one volume: The Fox/ The Captain’s Doll/ The Ladybird- D H Lawrence. World War One had a profound effect on Lawrence’s writing, as it did many other writers. We can see it clearly in the themes embedded in these stories. It is not surprising when we consider that Lawrence was forced into exile at this point by British authorities, who were uncomfortable with Lawrence for a few reasons: he was living, in 1915, in Cornwall, a place in which it could be argued that you could collude with the German navy. He was by this time fairly newly married to one Frieda von Richthofen, cousin to the ‘Red Baron.’ He and Frieda went for late night walks with their torches and sat inside their cottage singing German folk songs. And above all, Lawrence was a writer, and excused from war time services after a humiliating episode that occurred at Bodmin barracks (described in the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo.)  He referred to the episode in a letter as a ‘spiritual disaster.’ The key idea, I think, that the three novellas deal with is the idea of the impact on the individual of war, and his or her dehumanisation as a result. War has created damaged people and damaged societies, and this theme was an obsession with Lawrence from his early story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ in1914 onwards.

The least interesting, for me, was The Ladybird. Its major characters have all suffered loss, and know people who have suffered imprisonment and serious wounds. On his return from war, Basil is a much changed man. Lady Daphne (based on Lawrence’s real friendship with Lady Cynthia Asquith), yearns deeply for the return of her husband from war as the Armistice approaches. Waiting for him she thinks of his body, ‘beautiful, white-fleshed , with the fine sprinkling of warm-brown hair like tiny flames.’ She remembers their ‘loved-days’ and their shared ‘lovely, simple intimacy.’ The Ladybird reminds us, on Basil’s return, of how much the war altered people, and destroyed relationships. The first thing that Lady Daphne notices is the scar. For Basil, seeing his wife again is a miracle. She is no longer a girl, but a woman now. His eyes quickly scan her face, her throat, her breast. She has trouble reconnecting and doesn’t want to touch him. He has become ‘like risen death’ to her. She secretly holds in her hand a thimble which contains the ‘ladybird’ crest, given to her by Count Dionys. The Count, a German prisoner at Voynich Hall, has usurped her husband’s place in her affections, and she has visited the Count several times whilst her husband has been at war. In Dionys, Lawrence presents us with a sympathetic psychological portrait of the enemy. It was the dehumanization of the enemy that was one of the things about wartime that appalled him. War time alters things between people for ever.

The Fox is a much better story. And the weight of the war is everywhere in this story as well. It is because of the war that two women- March and Banford- are running a farm together, when ordinarily these women might have married. Their potential husbands are at war and are possibly being killed. They have a young male visitor who becomes like the fox that kills the women’s chickens. He is like a predator as he sets his sights on March. And there is a none- too- subtle fire within Banford as she, jealously, worries she will lose her friend. Henry Grenfell is insistent on March marrying him. The mere touch of Grenfell troubles and confuses  March as he delves deeper into her psyche: ‘..he drew her gently towards him and kissed her neck, softly. She winced and trembled and hung away. But his strong young arm held her, and he kissed her softly again.’

 Grenfell is sly like the fox, and equally dangerous. Much later he literally gets rid of his opposition in the guise of a falling tree that kills Banford. I remember travelling through the Berkshire countryside in 2002, not far from where Lawrence was living in Chapel Farm Cottage where he wrote a good portion of The Fox. There was a pub that we passed called The Fox, and it looked 17^th or 18^th Century, so it made me wonder. The woman who now lives at the cottage found a fork with the initials DHL printed on it in her back garden. I wrote to one of Lawrence’s chief biographers about this via email, and he was unable to verify whether or not the Lawrence’s made imprints on their cutlery.

                                                                                                              

The third of the trilogy of novellas is The Captain’s Doll which is a lighter and more fanciful story, beautifully written, but containing its dark passages too. The germ of the story came to Lawrence when he and Frieda visited Frieda’s wealthy sister, Nusch, and her family, at Zell-am-See for a month in Austria from July 1921.  Lawrence found it impossible to write here, but it was restorative and before he left he was able to set foot for the first time on a glacier.

In The Captain’s Doll, we are given a fascinating snapshot into life in the defeated territories after the war. Inflation is rampant and poverty and corruption abounds. The most significant section of the novella takes place at one of the afore-mentioned glaciers, as we are witness to an excursion to the glacier by Hannele (the Frieda character) and Captain Hepburn (the Lawrence character.) The pair have climbed the sheer rock face and find themselves at a great height overlooking the valley and a multitude of streams and rivers rushing downwards in waterfalls and cascades. Both are exhilarated, yet they are ‘not in good company together.’ Hannele exclaims ‘wonderful! wonderful!’whilst Hepburn’s response is ‘Yes- and horrible. Detestable.’ He says he is no ‘mountain-topper’ which places him at odds with the healthy young locals, bare arms and bare chest, with all the trendy mountain gear- the knapsack and alpenstock, the ‘ghastly fanged boots’, all of which Hepburn finds ‘repulsive.’ He admits to hating people who are ‘prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted’, hating the mountains for their ‘affectation’, whilst she describes them in awe-struck terms as ‘god’s mountains.’

They finally arrive at the main glacier, the unhappy couple, so at odds with each other! Hepburn it seems is reluctantly fascinated by the whole thing, and is determined to climb all over it. Hannele wisely keeps her distance. Then he peers over the edge and sees a world of ice: ‘a terrible place of hills and valleys and slopes, all motionless, all of ice.’ And he is frightened of it. Once he descends, safely, he is full of emotion, but can only comment, bitterly :’I’ve been far enough. I prefer the world where cabbages will grow on the soil. Nothing grows on glaciers.’

So why does Hepburn have such a repugnant view of the glacier? For me the clue lies in the fascinating and telling response he has to what he has witnessed:’ Never a warm leaf to unfold, never a gesture of life to give off. A world sufficient unto itself in lifelessness, all this ice.’

Hepburn experiences the glacier as a place of death. With his focus on war and the atmosphere around him, the natural world has turned sour and left him with bitter feelings. Everything is sterile. Especially at this time, with the war machine in full swing, life is especially precious to Lawrence, and real feeling, real emotion, real human contact is everything. The war tainted his thoughts and his subject matter and the characters in his books as he wrote them for the rest of his life.

The Accidental Traveller

THIS morning I went to the city market with my wife and two kids. She shopped for fruit and vegetables, and I took off with the kids to Readings in Carlton and bought the youngest one a picture story book about a little girl called Lulu. We drove back to the market where we were all reunited, close by the American doughnut van. The plan was for the wife and kids to go somewhere for the day and listen to popular local singer and actor, Justine Clark, while I caught a tram home with all the market shopping.

In fact, as it turned out, I caught a lot of public transport today, and decided at the end of it that it is much more interesting than driving. When the tram arrived, I had no idea how I was going to get the heavy trolley onto it. You see, I had a dozen eggs, two kilos of large potatoes, and lots of carrots on the bottom rung of the trolley alone. On the top rung I had a multitude of different types of fruit: apples, peaches, nectarines, kiwi fruit, bananas, and so on, and so it all adds up!

Well as it turns out, there was a tall, stocky man already on the tram, willing to lend a hand. From the bottom step I sort of coerced the trolley in his path on the top step, and he hauled it in for me. He had an American accent and spoke softly , almost in a feminine way, which belied the strength that was apparent in his arms and his body. He got off a couple of stops later when we were still in the city, and he caught my eye. He seemed to long for some kind of gratitude or reassurance, which I gave him. His face seemed to have a strange sense of sadness or longing.

The journey became a bit uninteresting then- or at least, I stopped looking about me- as I became immersed in Anne Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist.’ I only started it last night.

At the end of the journey, which was also the tram terminus, I was once again stuck with the slightly disconcerting idea that I would have to lug the heavy trolley down this time. I thought I might have to bounce it down onto the second rung, then the bottom rung, then a bit jolt onto the ground, and I was worried the metal wheels might snap. And lo and behold, out of nowhere came a voice- two in fact- and I was rescued again by some civilian decency. This time it was two big Asian girls, very good natured, who held the bottom end of the trolley each so I could manoeuvre it down without incident. It ended up being quite a good journey home. I became immersed in my book and had some much needed help along the way.

Well when I got home I had to do some washing and putting clothes out in the dry February heat. Then I started putting the food away as well, ensuring that the cold meat went in the fridge quickly. At the back of my mind I knew that I had an eye appointment soon at a large retail shopping centre, so I didn’t have a lot of time. And yes, more public transport, but no excess luggage this time, just my new book. The tidying and putting away took ages, and I wanted to clean my teeth properly because I knew I was going to have my mouth quite close to the face of an optometrist in half an hour, which is what happens when they look deep into your eyes with machines.

So I left home quickly and had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the bus around the corner that would take me to the shopping centre and my appointment. The bus finally came- waiting ages meant I would be late- and I chose a seat quite close to the front. Within two stops a woman who looked like she might be from Thailand sat right next to me, even though there were plenty of vacant seats about. I didn’t mind because she was kind of pretty, but as it turns out very fidgety. She drank lots of water and her phone rang twice. She had short conversations in a language I didn’t understand, and gesticulated quite a lot. She was also very conscious of people about her. As the bus became quite full, she seemed obsessed with ensuring that frail and elderly people had a seat, which was kind of her.

At the shopping centre at last, I became lost briefly- I saw a phrase in ‘The Accidental Tourist’ on the way that sums me up perfectly: ‘geographic dyslexia.’ I was half an hour late. The reading of the novel along the way meant that my demeanour and my language changed when I spoke to the optometrist. This always happens when I see a film I enjoy, or read a book I like a lot. I get very easily influenced. It happened dramatically when I first read ‘Catcher In The Rye’ all those years ago, and it happened now with Anne Tyler. It also happened, somewhat dangerously, when I left the cinema when I first saw the remake of  ‘Cape Fear.’ I walked and felt like the deranged character played by Robert De Niro.

Somewhat typically, I got lost again when I started looking for the bus stop when I left the optometrist. I read intermittently on the way home, but the people scenery was too interesting. Firstly at the bus stop I noticed the teenage girls- who all looked the same- flirting with the teenage boys thirty or forty feet away. One of the girls yelled out ‘you look hot!’, which was a ‘come on’ gesture if ever I’ve heard one.

On the bus, there was a bald retarded man sitting next to another sullen man with a scraggly beard and dishevelled clothing. They were looking at their DVD copy of a Tom Cruise film called ‘Knight and Day’ as if it was a first edition of ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Ulysses.’

At the first stop a youngish black man got on, wearing high boots and a black shirt unbuttoned all the way down exposing an unremarkable chest. He was very unhappy and restless and definitely ‘had issues’ to use a colloquial phrase. His feet jutted out of the aisle too much, and a nice woman brushed past them as she walked to the back of the bus. He grimaced when she said sorry as if she had trodden on his toes wearing screw in football boots. A bit later another woman, with a pram this time, also touched his feet as she sauntered past, also saying sorry. Very decent these women! His petulant retort was ‘no you’re not!’ which took her aback. He had some papers in his hand which he scrutinized carefully all the way. They didn’t look like a big deal to me, but he held them as if they were some precious, mysterious letters. When he got off the bus, the bus driver waved and said ‘thanks very much!’, and the black man ignored him completely! He limped as he got off which reminded me a lot of Crooks from ‘Of Mice and Men’, so suddenly I felt sorry for him.

Not long before my journey’s end, with not much more of ‘The Accidental Tourist’ read, a young Asian couple got and sat opposite me. She wore tracksuit pants and had a gaping hole up her sleeve so you could see her whole black bra if you wanted to. She looked about eighteen. Her boyfriend? also looked eighteen, and he had the languid look of irresponsibility about him. His pants were loose and his underwear showed and he grinned a lot as if he was incredibly carefree. Except he wasn’t. The two of them had a toddler still in a pram, a sad, sullen looking boy, with the sort of expression you would have on your face if you had young parents who were really not very ready for you to come along. I felt sorry for her. She looked like she cared deeply, and was doing her best to be a responsible parent. The partner, on the other hand, was very distracted and didn’t take a lot of notice of his child. There were, however, two telling incidents. The first was when he lunged, suddenly, for his boy and ran his big brown hand over his kid’s hair in an aggressive and over the top fashion which hurt the little boy. A few minutes later he casually grabbed one of his cheeks and pulled it vigorously and caused the poor little boy to grimace and well up in tears. The mother laughed, it seemed, out of not wanting to clash with her partner, but it probably pained her. The boy was stoic though. His face became resolute and determined and he shrugged this off as just another incident in a bewildering day out with mum and dad.

Mike Leigh: A New Film, New Controversy

MIKE LEIGH IN THE PAPER



MIKE Leigh has come under the reviewer’s scrutiny in The Age on both days this weekend (Jan 28-29). His latest film, ‘Another Year’ has just opened in Melbourne. In both cases, it isn’t just a discussion about the film that unfolds. It is also an examination of Leigh as a director. In terms of critical appraisal he is a bit hit and miss. You will find many reviewers across the globe who admire Leigh’s work, and just as many who will find plenty of fault.


Tom Ryan makes his focus immediately clear by using the words ‘rough ride’ at the beginning. For him, Leigh can be a bit depressing, and ‘Another Year’ is a case in point. He also uses the word ‘caricature’ to describe Lesley Manville’s character, a key role. Ryan thinks the actors aren’t given room in the script to move. That they start off a certain way and fail to change, or grow: ‘There are moments when the characters seemed poised to break out of the straitjackets they’ve been forced to wear, but Leigh won’t cut them loose.’ This seems like a sensible review to me. He finds fault with the way the characters fail to emerge, and that’s fine, even if I don’t share his point of view. A good feature of Ryan’s review is that it is objective. He offers, as he sees it, an excellent example of a character in a recent Leigh film that did change, and did emerge, and therefore he gives it a glowing assessment. The film is ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, and the actress was Sally Hawkins, playing Poppy: ‘..that film led us to see that there was much more to its protagonist than initially met the eye.’ Perhaps Tom Ryan wanted Mary to eventually find some peace of mind? I am personally glad she didn’t.


Also this weekend, a much longer discussion, primarily focused on the director, as well as his recent film, by Stephanie Bunbury: ‘True Leigh Low On Sympathy.’ (which follows at the end).


The discussion starts with a well known Leigh quote about each film being essentially the same, and the object being to create people ‘with all our faults and virtues- vulnerable, good and bad.’ And again, ‘all my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people.’ The problem for Stephanie Bunbury is, she can’t find the sympathetic note that Leigh searches for in his films. She refers to what Leigh calls ‘complexities and issues’ as ‘misery.’ She then goes through a list of his back catalogue, creating divisive and usually derisive adjectives to describe his characters, from 1977’s ‘Abigail’s Party’, ‘which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt’, all the way through to ‘Another Year ‘, and Lesley Manville’s character Mary, representative of a string of ‘generally appalling women’, many of which are even ‘ridiculous and despicable.’


Bunbury’s biggest beef is with the women in Leigh’s film, and her discussion is from a strong feminist standpoint. She is entitled, obviously, to this point of view. I have seen most of the films that Bunbury is uncomfortable with. The fact that my opinion differs so strongly can only be in the interpretation of these films. Why we interpret the films differently is anybody’s guess. A big reason must be that she is female and I am male. But of course it must be more than that. To counteract, therefore, some of Bunbury’s arguments:


First and foremost I have a lot of sympathy for many of the characters that Bunbury struggles to enjoy. I can’t see the ‘steely contempt’ drawn in the people in ‘Abigail’s Party’ for example. Even the husbands in the film, that are either sullen or dull, or trampled upon and hopeless, are ordinary people. They have their faults and virtues in bucket loads. They are a certain type, but seem to me to be authentic, and this is what I am seeking.


I am yet to see what Bunbury refers to as Leigh’s ‘nastiest film, ‘High Hopes.’ She admits that ‘Life Is Sweet’ is ‘comparatively benign’ but still refers to the way in which Leigh ‘wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy’s embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.’ Again, our focus is very different. I don’t remember this scene. For me this film is memorable for its treatment of teenage ennui in the character played by Jane Horrocks, which has nothing to do with treatment of class, or a ‘vicious portrait of suburban aspiration’ as Bunbury refers to it.


Then we get to Bunbury’s description of some of Leigh’s women. She uses the words pretentious, neurasthenic, appalling, resentful, infuriating, dried-up, screeching, amongst others to define them.






So it occurs to me, more than ever, that a reviewer writes for a certain audience, and sometimes it isn’t very broad. Stephanie Bunbury looks at the film from a certain angle- a very personal, feminist one. Mostly because I am male, my concerns are different to hers. Therefore my reading of the film is different. Therefore I cannot read too much into a Bunbury review of a film of this type because I know she will come from a completely different angle, with a completely different focus, and this will cause a wide variation in our levels of appreciation.

I saw ‘Another Year’ and loved it. Just like I have loved most of Leigh’s work, particular ‘Nuts In May’, ‘Vera Drake’, ‘Secrets and Lies’ and ‘All Or Nothing.’ The film centred particularly on Lesley Manville, in her role as a struggling woman called Mary. There were a number of Bergman like shots of Mary’s beautiful but lined and tired face in close-up. Leigh burrowed his way into her soul. Mary’s face reflected her pain and longing beautifully. The film ends, quietly, as it stays with Mary who is sitting around a dinner table with her friends. She is almost sobbing and is completely lost. She simply doesn’t know what to do. As with Timothy Spall’s tear-stained face when he realises his wife doesn’t love him anymore; as with Jane Horrocks, crying when Alison Steadman forces her to face her predicament; Vera Drake shell-shocked when the police gate-crash her party: my experience is that these are some of the most moving scenes in cinema.


For me, none of Bunbury’s adjectives fit Mary. And I certainly don’t see her as ‘generally appalling’, ‘ridiculous and despicable.’ Mary moved me. I felt sorry for her. I am full of sympathy. I thought she was sad and helpless, but not pathetic. There are many women and men like Mary in society. Life has passed them by somehow. She is getting older and she is desperate for some good company. Touching somebody or comfort in some way initially, intimacy even better, later. A good car that is reliable. Her own house. Is this all too much to ask? It seems it is, and Mary hides behind her insecurities by pretending things are ok, and by drinking too much, and by visiting her generous friends too often. And therefore she is very real. And Mike Leigh is giving people like Mary a voice. To remind us that fragile and dependant and troubled people like Mary exist.

And it’s not just the women in life who struggle. Again, a very honest and a very real character is Ronnie, who is in his sixties, and suddenly finds himself alone after the death of his wife. Ronnie is shell shocked, bewildered by this turn of events, and Leigh provides a long scene in which Mary and Ronnie are by themselves in Tom and Gerie’s house, communicating and reaching out to each other and providing succour in a world in which they desperately crave affection.


I reject outright Bunbury’s notion of a lack of sympathy, a type of sneering, and the negativity she associates with these characters. But perhaps we come from completely different worlds with different experiences.

 







True Leigh low on sympathy


Stephanie Bunbury


January 29, 2011






"Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity," says Mike Leigh.


Intensely scrutinised and true to type, Mike Leigh's miserable middle and lower-class characters have little room to grow.


'THE truth is that each film is different," says Mike Leigh, "but as Jean Renoir said, we all go on making the same film. What all these films are about is saying to people 'look, this is how we are with all our faults and virtues — vulnerable, good and bad'. All my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people." How elusive, then, sympathy can be.


At 67, Leigh is often described as Britain's greatest filmmaker. With five Oscar nominations behind him, an OBE, the top awards from Cannes and Venice film festivals (for Secrets and Lies in 1996 and Vera Drake in 2004) among dozens of other prizes, he sometimes seems almost beyond criticism.


He is certainly the only director in the world who can regularly muster sufficient funding for projects that begin with no script, no star cast and no guiding idea — at least, none that Leigh is prepared to share with anybody.


The scripts are worked up through improvisations, typically over a period of six months. "To be honest, the fact that I'm allowed to do what I do in the way that I do it never ceases to amaze me," Leigh said once. "I think I've been remarkably lucky. Nobody has ever interfered, ever."


Leigh's latest film, Another Year, features several of his regular collaborators — Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as Tom and Gerri, a devoted couple in late middle age, Lesley Manville as their neurotically needy younger friend — whose comings and goings are observed over the span of four seasons marked out in their garden allotment, an oasis of satisfaction.


Outside, misery — or, as Leigh puts it, "the many complexities and issues about how we live our lives" — lies drably in wait. Gerri, a counsellor by day, must cope on more evenings than she might want with Mary, who is perpetually agitated and endlessly unlucky with men, cars and drinking choices. Tom, salt-of-the-earth that he is, has his own millstone: Peter Wight's Ken, a widower whose gloom has settled on him like cloud on a mountain top. Some people, Leigh agrees, have no talent for happiness.


Another Year is Leigh's 13th feature-length film. His first was Bleak Moments (1972), but it was his plays made for the BBC in the '70s that established his credentials. Perhaps the most enduring and important was Abigail's Party (1977), which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt.


But Meantime (1983) was even more savage, the lives of a family on a London housing estate in an endless dreary round of broken washing machines and the ritual humiliation of the dole office. It was thus that Leigh became the anointed chronicler of Thatcher's Britain.


Five years later, his first film made for the cinema in 17 years, High Hopes, took on the ascendant new Tories with their shoulder pads and renovations in what remains Leigh's nastiest film: he wasted little sympathy on them. Even in his next film, the comparatively benign Life is Sweet (1990), Leigh wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy's embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.


Not everyone is persuaded that these vicious portraits of suburban aspiration are the greatest films Britain has made. Some have ventured that, particularly in these early films, the upper-crust characters — and, even more despicably, those who aspire to be like them — are no more than caricatures, crudely drawn ones at that. He has also been accused of misogyny, although his affectionate portraits of women in Vera Drake (2004) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) have gone some way to redressing the damage done to his reputation by Naked (1993). It was this film, unquestionably his grimmest, that was his most controversial.


Naked opens with a shambling street philosopher, David Thewlis's Johnny, raping a woman in a Manchester back alley. We then follow him through his meanderings to London, ostensibly in an attempt to escape a beating from his victim's family, where all the women he meets are similarly suffering, sad and generally supine. It was their collective failure to provide any resistance to Johnny's malevolent charisma that raised some feminists' ire.


None of this criticism seemed to touch Leigh; he is a practised curmudgeon and, moreover, has a capacity to hit the ball back so hard that he ends up winning every point. "Obviously, the assertions that it was a misogynist film are ridiculous and not even worth talking about," he said dismissively at the time. "I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important," he said on another occasion. "Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity." There is no arguing, it seems, with "everyone".


More telling to me than the rapist as dubious hero, however, is the string of risibly pretentious, neurasthenic and generally appalling women, usually childless and sliding into a resentful middle age, who pin down the loser's end of so many of Leigh's ensemble casts. The infuriating Mary in Another Year is one in a long line that starts with Beverly in Abigail's Party and includes the dried-up Barbara in Mean-time, the screeching lower middle-class Valerie, craving parity with her posh neighbour, in High Hopes and Monica in Secrets and Lies, all of whom are drawn as simultaneously ridiculous and despicable.


Leigh does not see them this way; Mary, like her predecessors, is both victim of circumstance and author of her own fate as, indeed, we all are. "I refuse to allow anybody to draw me into reducing (her) in such a way that misses the point of the film," he snaps, "which is the complexity of how we are."


Leigh has compared the complex reality he sets out to depict in his films to that in a documentary. The worlds he shows are so detailed they seem to exist independently of the camera. This is the purpose of months of rehearsal. "We really know who these people are. We know everything there is to know about them socially, economically and in every detail of their lives".


And it is this, really, that seems to me the real trouble with Mike Leigh. Nobody knows everything about anyone. If his characters seem exaggerated, it is because they are over-examined types, each with a set of characteristics and preferences that add up to someone we feel, often with a painful sort of amusement, we recognise.


And if their habitual tics, such as Imelda Staunton's constant invitations to all and sundry to have a cup of tea in Vera Drake, rapidly become tiresome, it is because they are repeated with so much significance. Every time Vera delivers the tea line, we tick off her chief perceived trait of homely kindness. Almost everything said illustrates some aspect of the character saying it. If they are types, they are assiduously true to those types.


This means that it is well nigh impossible for them to change. Leigh maintains that while some people see Another Year as optimistic and others as pessimistic, it is actually neither, its much-vaunted complexity meaning that it contains many possibilities for the future. Certainly, we may each read these situations differently but the characters are too firmly fixed to alter those situations. There are Leigh films — All or Nothing (2002) is a moving example — that end with catharsis, but it is through confrontation between selves that remain immutable in themselves.


Perhaps this doesn't matter. Leigh says he likes his films and is pleased they are out in the world and, with the exception of High Hopes, so am I. His admirable commitment, however, shouldn't mean his films are beyond argument. And however much actors enjoy those long rehearsal times and getting to the bottom of their characters' histories — and however great some of the performances — the fact remains that others emerge as cheap parody, less convincing than those drummed up on unrehearsed first takes on the Hollywood films Leigh so despises. As for the sympathy he feels for them — well, that remains as elusive as ever.

THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF LONDON, 1918

OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD, DH LAWRENCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF


THIS morning I spent a glorious hour or so trawling through a book that came my way recently: Katherine Mansfield Collected Letters Vol 2. One of the best things about a good book collection is that it allows one book to lead on to another, and then another, and then another. It started like this:
I was reading some of KM’s letters to Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett and Virginia Woolf as well as some others. The year was 1918 and she was living with John Middleton Murry, a comfortable middle-class existence, at Portland Villas, Hampstead. KM was earning money from the occasional short story (‘Bliss’, for example, in the English Review). She was also contributing reviews and articles for various other publications, and had her father’s annual stipend of 300 pounds. Murry himself was doing a good deal of writing for the TLS and the Nation and working for the War Office , and as editor of the Athenaeum was earning a healthy 800 pounds.

    KM 1919 PASSPORT PHOTORAPH

The Murry’s, fairly recently married, nicknamed their new house the ‘Elephant’ in reference to its white colour and large shape. KM was very ill by 1918. The good news at the end of the year was that the Armistice was signed. The war had taken its toll on everyone, not the least KM who lost her closest relative, her beloved brother Leslie, on the battlefield in 1915. At around the same time the war ended KM was told news she must have already suspected. Tuberculosis was going to take her life at a premature age. In 1918, at the age of 30, she was told she probably only had a few years to live. She died in January, 1923 at the age of 35.

'THE ELEPHANT', PORTLAND VILLAS

So here she is, on October 22, 1918, writing to Brett, having just received a visit from D H Lawrence: “He takes himself dreadfully serious now-a-days; I mean he sees himself as a symbolic figure- a prophet- the voice in the wilderness crying ‘woe.” Lawrence and Frieda are around the corner at Well Walk, Hampstead. It’s all fortuitous timing because Frieda and KM don’t get on well anymore, and Murry and Lawrence have had (at this point) and unspoken falling out, later to become much worse. Now Frieda has the ‘flu and is in bed, Murry is working, so Lawrence is taking the opportunity to make lots of visits to KM. even though he doesn’t think a lot of her writing (possibly isn’t terribly familiar with it). Just five days later, again to Brett, KM seems to have changed her tune a little: “For me, at least, the dove brooded over him too. I loved him: He was just his old merry, rich self, laughing, describing things, giving you pictures, full of enthusiasm and joy in a future where we were all ‘vagabonds’- …oh, there is something so lovable in him- and his eagerness, his passionate eagerness for life- that is what one loves so.” What a change! With her horrible illness, perhaps her moods are interchangeable. Lawrence is very fond of her and recreated her personality for some of his important texts (such as Gudrun in ‘Women In Love’). In this case it is the MSS of a play he has just written, called ‘Touch & Go’ which he has placed in her hands during the same week. There is a character called Anabel Wrath in the play that Lawrence has clearly based on KM and I suspect that he wants to share the portrait with her. Alas, as KM writes to Ottoline Morrell, she makes an initial observation, probably off-putting- ‘I have glanced inside and it looks black with miners…I do wish he could come up up out of the Pit for ever- But he won’t” and doesn’t bother with the rest, therefore not coming across the character called Anabel (Lawrence’s hopes extinguished).


D H LAWRENCE CIRCA 1920

Now during the time of these little visits, Lawrence is writing to a farmer friend on October 30 called Hocking about KM and how she is an invalid these days and can’t get about anymore : “Poor Mrs Murry has consumption of the lungs- cannot go outside the house.- But still, I think if the war ends, and she could go away to Italy or somewhere warm, she might get better.” Lawrence’s heart no doubt goes out to her. He is in denial himself because he has the same illness (often talks of ‘bronchial troubles’), yet he is in a sense lucky because he still has six or seven years of reasonable health, eventually succumbing in 1930. Lawrence wasn’t the only one that thought a warm climate might ‘cure’ tuberculosis. It would certainly be a comforting thought. He was to pack his bags for Italy a few years later too.


And then we have Virginia Woolf writing in her diary (Vol 1-18 Feb 1919), weighing up whether or not she can classify KM as a friend: “The truth is, I suppose, that one of the conditions unexpressed but understood of our friendship has been precisely that it was almost entirely founded on quicksands. It has been marked by curious slides and arrests; for months I’ve heard nothing of her; then we have met again upon what has the appearance of solid ground.” How much more difficult to communicate in those days, and how many instances there must have been of problems associated with communication, especially around war time. Letters go missing, people misinterpret things. Woolf visited KM at the ‘Elephant’ several times in 1918, but her diary mainly details a response to Murry, who, like Lawrence, she looks upon mostly unfavourably. Woolf’s feelings about KM are ambivalent. But at times she records admiration for her both as a person and as a writer. A perfect example of her ambivalence is when she writes in her diary, on October 11, 1917, “We could both wish that ones first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a- well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked at her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.” An interesting weighing up of somebody- is she worthy to be my friend or not? The ‘civet cat’ label is telling. KM was an extraordinary woman of her times. A similarly middle-class background to Woolf (her father was an eminent banker in New Zealand, and Woolf’s father was the well known and highly respected critic and writer, Leslie Stephen. KM became a kind of rival to Woolf, even though KM didn’t write novels. Virginia Woolf, like Lawrence, saw KM at her most vulnerable at the end of 1918. Visiting Portland Villas, she commented in her diary “..husky and feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman…Illness, she said, breaks down one’s privacy so that one can’t write- The long story she has written breathes nothing but hate.” Woolf’s body didn’t cave in like this- which may be seen as a lucky thing. But her handicap in a sense was much worse. For years she battled madness and heard voices in her head, and eventually drowned herself near her property in Sussex.


VIRGINIA WOOLF CIRCA 1920


And KM, for her part, described Leonard and Virginia Woolf as ‘smelly’ in a letter to Murry on February 17, 1918 (no reference to ‘civet cat’, however). When she Woolf three months later, just after marrying Murray in May, she describes her as ‘very nice’ in a letter to Brett (in her diary Woolf sums up KM as being ‘marmoreal’ in regards to the same outing). An in a letter to Woolf herself, on November 7, 1918, from Portland Villas, KM probably feeling somewhat tragic and vulnerable over her fate, tells her “You are immensely important in my world, Virginia.” This letter comes the day after Woolf visited her, and made the diary entry about KM being ‘husky and feeble’, above.


What a glorious thing, therefore, are letters, and how lucky I am to be able to access all these from within the confines of my own bookshelf!


Less than a year later KM will write her first serious will which she leaves at the Bank of New Zealand for Murry to access when she dies four years later: “Any money I have is yours, of course. I expect there will be enough to bury me. I don’t want to be cremated and I don’t want a tombstone or anything like that. If its possible to choose a quiet place- please do. You know how I hate noise.” Well KM didn’t quite get her wish. She died at Fontainbleau in 1923 and is buried with a lovely inscription from Henry IV. This particular letter finishes with “That’s all. But don’t let anybody mourn me. It can’t be helped. I think you ought to marry again and have children.” Murry did- his next wife also died young, of tuberculosis. But first they had a daughter together- whom he named Katherine Middleton Murry.

‘But I tell you, my Lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’

Notes:

D H Lawrence: Touch & Go, C W Daniel Ltd, London, 1920

The Letters of D H Lawrence Vol 3 1916-1921, Cambridge University Press, 1984

Katherine Mansfield: Collected Letters Vol 2 1918-1919, OUP 1987

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-1919, The Hogarth Press, London, 1977

Jessie, Louie, Frieda and D H Lawrence

AT last it is now holidays, and I have squeezed in some time to be re-reading D H Lawrence’s early days, especially his romances, the years from 1906-1912, when, starting in 1906 around the time of his 21st birthday, he began a 150 letters or so correspondence with an important early influence, Louie Burrows.

                                                                                                                   

Lawrence fell in love before he met Louie. His other significant ‘friendship’ during this period was with Jessie Chambers (Miriam in Sons & Lovers). He would visit Jessie and her family at their place in Nottingham called ‘Hagg’s Farm.’ He would always remember visiting the Hagg’s from when he was a boy. It made him feel alive and he had important friendships there with Jessie’s brothers and her parents as well. Mrs Lawrence never approved but the young David Lawrence would walk there from his home in Eastwood, and entertain the family with his wit and intelligence. He would share his love of botany and drawing and literature with the Chambers’ family, in particular Jessie. They would rebound ideas off each other and discuss French, Mathematics, and fashionable philosophers and writers of the day, and those of the past. Lawrence would always be asking Jessie to read books that he had just read, and she, in love with him, would dutifully respond. Then began a passionate friendship that developed further, but Lawrence was always dogged by sexual frustration. Of her time, Jessie, it seems, was a model of chastity. Their sometimes turbulent friendship is portrayed in much of Sons & Lovers in the guise of Paul and Miriam. This book cannot be taken as autobiography, however, as Jessie disagreed with much of it, and felt that she didn’t come out of it fairly or truthfully. It seems that at some point Lawrence knew that it would be wrong to go on seeing Jessie, alone at least. It comes, characteristically, from his mother, that Lawrence decided it would not do Jessie’s reputation, or prospects, any good if they were to go on being seen alone together, as their friendship continued past their late teens.

Lawrence had strong friendships with other women at this time. Some we know less about, like Agnes Holt and Blanche Jennings, others feature in surviving correspondence so we can track their level of involvement. Helen Corke was someone Lawrence met in teaching, and his second novel, ‘The Trespasser’ comes directly out of his relationship with her.

Of all the young relationships Lawrence had, it is the one with Louie Burrows that I find the most appealing. The Burrows lived in a lovely Nottinghamshire village called Cossall (Cossethay in ‘The Rainbow’- the Burrows family appear as the Brangwen’s in this novel). Their house was ‘Church Cottage’, still standing, with Louie’s name on a blue plaque out the front. Lawrence and Louie both trained as teachers in 1902, and both went on to study at University College in Nottingham in 1906 where their friendship was cemented. By late 1908 Lawrence found a job teaching in Croydon (where he would remain until he became too ill to teach in 1911), and Louie’s career path took her briefly to Leicester, and then eventually as Headmistress in a school in nearby Quorn. Subsequently, meetings took place mostly in the school holidays.

Lawrence and Louie became engaged at the end of 1910, six days before Mrs Lawrence died. Lawrence proposed to Louie on the train and considering the extent of devotion that existed between mother and son, one wonders at how rational Lawrence’s decision can be seen. Was this merely just a snatch at happiness, desperate to keep his sad emotions at bay? Perhaps Lawrence wanted his mother to see him as a happy, settled man before she died (notably with Louie, whom she liked, not with Jessie, whom she hated.)

Then came 1911, otherwise known as the ‘sick year’, a year in which Lawrence nearly died of pneumonia. On top of that, Lawrence knew painfully that he was not in a financial position to become married. He wasn’t able to fulfil his own personal expectation of being able to earn 120 pounds a year, with 100 pounds already in the bank.


By the beginning of 1912, as this all dawned on Lawrence, it became clear to him that the marriage was never going to happen. Lawrence’s letters became shorter. The perennial sense of sexual frustration never abated. Lawrence had again chosen a young woman with a strict code of manners. Poems written at this time discuss the repressed desire that Louie felt compelled to enforce:


‘Yet if I lay my hand in her breast,

She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is

Endangered by the pilferer on his quest.’ (from Amores, 1916)


Lawrence also remarked to friends, perhaps in bitterness, that he felt that Louie was too inexperienced, too immature, this due to her unscarred youth. This idea of a lack of self-reliance is portrayed to some extent in Ursula in ‘The Rainbow.’


The relationship between the two began petering out, driven, by the end of 1911, and into 1912, partly by Lawrence’s precarious health. Unsatisfactory meetings continued, until a massive event in Lawrence’s life occurred that would put an end to their friendship altogether. Lawrence met the German wife of his former Professor of Languages and after meeting secretly at Charing Cross Station on May 3, 1912, Lawrence and Frieda crossed the Channel to Ostend to begin a new life together (although Frieda was not committed to a ‘new life’ with Lawrence at this early stage of their illicit relationship).


A couple of letters between Louie and Lawrence were exchanged during 1912, then neither heard from one another again. In the final letter Lawrence wrote to Louie, from Lake Garda in Italy, near the end of 1912, he spoke of the fact that he was ‘such a rotter’ to her, that she always treated him well, that he thinks of her with ‘gratitude and respect’ and that the ‘wrong’ is ‘all on my side.’ Then he comes out with this:


‘I am living here with a lady whom I love, and whom I shall marry when I come to England, if it is possible. We have been together as man and wife for six months, nearly, now, and I hope we shall always remain man and wife. I feel a beast writing this. But I do it because I think it is only fair to you. I never deceived you, whatever- or did I deceive you-? I may have done even that.- I have nothing to be proud of.-…The best thing you can do is to hate me. I loathe signing my name to this. D H Lawrence.’

(‘Lawrence In Love- Letters to LB from DHL’, Univ of Nottingham, 1968).


The final instalment in the story of Louie and Lawrence takes place in Vence, France in March, 1930. The depth of Louie’s affection for Lawrence can be guessed when we see that Louie twice visited Vence to see Lawrence’s grave, this despite the long period without contact. She was at this stage still unmarried and living with her parents in Quorn. Louie did eventually marry in 1940, and retired as Headmistress a year later. She died in 1962. Lawrence scholar, James T Boulton, says of Louie that ‘the wound received in 1912 had not healed in 1930.’


Jessie Chambers also married later, and she too never forgot Lawrence, not even remotely so. This can be seen in her book ‘D H Lawrence, A Personal Record’(1935) in which she states that she always saw in him ‘in the strictest sense of the word, immortal.’ Lawrence, too, always looked back fondly on Jessie and her family, writing a wonderfully tender and appreciative letter very late in life to Jessie’s brother about the unforgettable memories he had of Hagg’s Farm, and that his experiences there would remain with him forever.

It seems fitting that Lawrence ended up marrying the larger than life figure of Frieda Weekley. Some of the strength she must have embodied is suggested at by her preparedness to give up her family for a penniless, struggling author who she barely knew. Frieda had three young children when she ran off with Lawrence. She knew, as her former husband made clear, that this act meant the end of her relationship with them as a mother for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. She offered so much to Lawrence that the other women couldn’t match, and it is true that she benefitted from the daring, risky life he had to offer as well. She may have felt, however, that she had made a terrible mistake early on during their elopement. Lawrence found her bawling over photographs of her children, missing them terribly. He was frustrated by this sign of regret and told her to get over her decision in no uncertain terms, promptly ripping the photographs into pieces and storming off. A fierce, powerful, independent woman who perhaps had met her match.

                                     Church Cottage, Cossal, Notts.

Andrew O'Hagan on the James Bulger Tragedy

IN an essay published in the London Review of Books in 1993, Scottish author and essayist, Andrew O'Hagan wrote about the tragedy that is/was the murder of James Bulger by two ten year old boys:

' The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming. A number of men tried to reach the vehicles, to get at the youths inside, and scuffles spilled onto the road. Some leapt over crash-barriers and burst through police cordons, lobbing rocks and banging on the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd – sick with condemnation – howled and spat and wept. Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with ‘nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders’. Those two little offenders – if they were the offenders, the childish child-murderers from Walton – were caught on camera twice. First, on the security camera at the shopping precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress.'

The whole shocking incident was sickening and I will always remember reading about it years ago. When I was in Maidstone in England in 2001, the Headmistress of the school I was teaching at spoke of the horror she felt in regards to the newest details- not that the two young offenders were going to be released into a society somewhere, but that the howls of contempt were rising from the British public again. I saw her condemnation of the latest hysterical hatred and derision as a voice of reason amidst the chaos in the tabloid news, and I thanked her for it.

It was a disgusting and sickening act. But as O'Hagan says, somewhere else in his essay, it was also a crime to release the names of the offenders- Venables and Thompson- because two more lives were destroyed as a result. Add to this Kenneth Clarke's comment quoted above- (promised measures to deal with) 'nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders' and we have enough revulsion for a lifetime.