"Your a idoit" Clive James and P J O'Rourke

Politics seem to create blind spots in people who might otherwise be quite reasonable. If my side has told lies, it was only in the pursuit of a higher truth. If your side tells lies, they are the lowest of the low. If my side uses foul language, it is a result of passion. If your side uses bad language, they are dangerous extremists. It can be like what Yes Minister used to call irregular verbs:  My political views are informed, yours are mistaken, his are the blitherings of a dangerous idiot.

I have friends with whom I can discuss politics quite happily despite where we both might sit on the political spectrum. Others I avoid like the plague. They might be quite reasonable people otherwise but get them onto politics and the crazy come out. It seems that all those who differ in their opinion shouldn’t be allowed freedom of speech. They cannot imagine that anyone of any intelligence would think anything about any topic except what they believe, and those who do disagree with them are idiots at best, evil at worst. And if an election puts the other side into office, there is something very wrong with the system! They often call themselves liberals, but I may be displaying my own prejudices there.

Not that I think the terms ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ are particularly useful. If there is a political spectrum it is a line that runs from anarchy, where there is no government control at all, to totalitarianism, where government control is total, and the vast majority of Australians sit somewhere in the middle, as in any liberal democracy. Perhaps it is the small differences between modern political positions that make people want to treat them as gaping chasms, to be defended to the last. And the screaming battlefield is often online.

Comment sections on the Internet could cause one to despair about the future of the human race.  What was envisioned as a modern-day equivalent of the Athenian forum, or the cut and thrust of the Algonquin table degenerates quickly into ill-considered, poorly spelt and ungrammatical name-calling and abuse. And some ideas are so stupid that they seem to require repeating. One is the idea that those on the opposite side of the political spectrum have no sense of humour, and only people who think the same way we do are funny. If any evidence against this idea (one hesitates to give it such a word) is actually needed, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Clive James and P J O’Rourke.

James is an Australian left-wing liberal and O’Rourke an American right-wing libertarian. Politically they couldn’t be further apart (in a liberal democracy kind of way) but they are two of the funniest, most intelligent writers going around. And as the interview on James' website shows, they also get along very well.  (Scroll down about two thirds to find it.) Their books will always find a place on my shelf, and I read both not only for the content, but for what they can teach me about good writing. If this blog is anything it is an attempt for me to learn the art of the essay, and I am picky about my models.

They have their differences. James is serious writer who writes great gags, while O’Rourke is a humorist who makes serious points.  James’ career is based on literary criticism, while O’Rourke is a political and social writer. I think it is the intelligence that they have brought to bear on their political, cultural and social viewpoints that gives them the confidence in those viewpoints that allows them to joke about them, rather than rage.

The politics in PJ O’Rourke’s work is of course more obvious; it is his topic after all. And there are opinions in his work that would make a left-wing liberal gag. But, if that person is fair-minded, there are many that would make them laugh like drains. In his latest book, Don’t vote! It just encourages the bastards, O’Rourke attempts to summarise what he has learnt in forty years of political reporting.  He finds that Government is too large, the importance of politics is overrated, and that the government is trying to control too many aspects of its citizens’ lives. O’Rourke is writing firmly from an American viewpoint, but I imagine these ideas would find recognition in many Australian’s minds. And not just the ones who vote the same way I do.

Part of O’Rourke’s appeal is actually his fair-mindedness. He doesn’t idealise the Right and demonise the Left, and spends several chapters on how conservative governments in the US have not lived up to conservative, small government ideas. And he is open about the faults of conservative politics. Here he is on illegal immigrants:

George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said that if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship, they would have to do three things:  pay taxes, learn English and work in a meaningful job. Bush didn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications.

A writer of any political stripe would be proud of that line, both for its humour and for what it says about the debate about illegal immigration.

Clive James writes about society, history, literature, television and film.  His essays are full of big ideas leavened with big laughs. He is well-read in several languages, and his literary references sometimes makes me feel like I’ve never read a book in my life, not one that matters. And although politics is not his main topic, it can inform his essays and speeches. Like O’Rourke, he is not hostage to one set of political ideas. There is often an attempt to narrow all of us down. If I say I believe in A, there are people who rush to assume that I believe in B C and D. However, really all you can assume is that I believe in A, and the rest you can ask me about. But James has enough intelligence and integrity to discuss things as he sees them, not as he wishes they would be.

All James’ books of essays are worth looking at. His magnum opus is Cultural Amnesia, a book of essays each springing from a quotation, the whole of which is the result of his reading, writing and thinking throughout his career. The book can be dipped into at any point, but each essay requires attentive reading. Not that he is difficult to read, quite the contrary, but because he writes so well and incisively and wittily.

A lighter read is his by now five volume of autobiography. They can be read in any order, and I have just finished the fourth, North Face of Soho, an account of his early career in journalism, criticism, music and television. Again the humour is strong, but what struck me even more was his honesty. He writes about the people who taught him to write, who helped him to learn his craft, his successes and his failures. And he writes openly about the people he has done wrong, or let down along the way. At times, it is an almost painful journey of self-knowledge. If we are to be honest with our audience, we must first be honest with ourselves. I don’t want to make this book sound too heavy. It made me laugh out loud on the train several times. Not that that would worry too many people. Odds on I was wearing my train worker uniform at the time, so everyone had already assumed there was something wrong with me. (This is purely a reflection on what seems to be the Melbourne public’s attitude towards my employer, not on rail workers in general, a group of people I enjoy.)

James discusses in this volume an attempt to film the first volume, Unreliable Memoirs, about his Sydney childhood, which ultimately came to nothing. I wonder if anyone is still considering that. I hope so.

Good writing transcends mere politics. I think O’Rourke is right, we credit politics with too much importance. Enjoy writers, books, comedians and anyone else even if you disagree with their politics. Life’s too short, and people too important. After all, some of my best friends vote Labor.

"A house is not a home." Howard's End

Remember Forsterfest? Or was it the Forster Fiesta? Forster-au-go-go? Forsterpalooza? Whatever it was, in the late 80s and the early 90s the movies suddenly discovered a hot young novelist and put out films based on all but one of his novels. E M Forster had been dead for around twenty years at the time, but he was Hollywood’s go-to guy with films such as Howard’s End, A room with a view, A passage to India, Where angels fear to tread and Maurice.  A room with a view introduced the world to Helen Bonham Carter and began the debate on who was prettier, her or Julian Sands. I think blonde men seem to look weak on screen and our heroes do tend to be dark haired.  Exceptions abound of course: Daniel Craig for one, which gives us the Bond Index of 5:1 for dark-haired to blonde heroes. On the other hand, blonde men are rarer than dark-haired so maybe they are fighting above their weight in terms of screen representation.  In any case, Helena Bonham Carter is still bobbing up in expensive Oscar-nominated films, and I don’t know what Julian Sands is up to. Good luck to him in any case.

The most successful of the Forsterfest films in terms of reviews, box-office and awards was probably Howard’s End, which I saw in the cinema, in the company of a girl on whose distracting presence I blame for the fact I don’t think I understood the story at all. Alternatively, it could be I’m not too bright, always a chance. I read the book soon afterwards but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I was waiting for the events from the movie like stations on a train line, rather than enjoying the scenery on the way. Now some friends and I have started a tri-city Eastern seaboard online book group and our first book, it has been decided, is Howard’s End, which has had me re-reading it. Not sure how this book group will work, I’ve decided to put down a few thoughts here before our online discussion, in whatever form that will take.

Despite that being the only time I’ve seen the movie, I found I saw Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Samuel West and the other actor’s faces when I read the novel. For some of the scenes I could still remember the staging, and one of the lines in the last scene in I could hear quite distinctly in Hopkin’s voice, so the movie must have affected me more than I remember. With all those provisos, caveats and prejudices in mind, I found the book this time round something of a revelation.

The story is the clash between three families in Edwardian England, the half-German Schlegels, independently wealthy with interests in music, literature and other cultural pursuits, the Wilcoxes, also wealthy but a practical family of business, and the Basts, a poor couple on the bottom rung of society, with aspirations both to society and culture.  Their interactions take constantly surprising turns and result in tragedy and death, leaving the survivors wiser with a greater understanding of themselves and others.

The famous epithet of the novel is “Only connect…” and the tragedy derives from various characters’ failure to do so. The passionate Helen Shlegel entirely fails to see the virtues of the Wilcox family and others of their type, while the Wilcoxes are indulgent of the cultured Schlegels, but only up to a point, and rather obtusely. Leonard Bast fails to find a connection between his life and his dreams. The hero of the novel, if such a term is appropriate, is Margaret Schlegel whose unending patience and continuing efforts to bring these people together is ultimately a triumph, albeit a subdued one. Still today people are focussed more on what divides us. We have artists who affect disdain anything to do with sport, for example, and others who want to dismiss anything artistic as a bit of a wank. It seems to me that the things that make us the same are more interesting than the things that keep us apart.

Penguin Books always come with a small introductory essay, which can be very useful. I often read these first – that’s where they sit in the book – but I wonder if I shouldn’t leave them to last. They do assume knowledge of the story that follows, which can also mean, in modern speak, ‘spoilers’ of what is to follow. In a true classic, how the story ends is only one part of the attraction. But still it is nice to be taken by surprise by the events.  This is all a preamble to my own little spoiler coming up in the next paragraph.

Having seen the movie, I knew Helen had a son by Leonard Bast, but this tryst has often been called unbelievable, most famously by Virginia Woolf, who wondered if his umbrella might be responsible. I thought it worked.  Helen is well established as impulsive and passionate, and at that point of the story overwrought so the idea that she would seduce the married Bast (and that’s how I understood it, not he seducing her) is very plausible. If you do not agree, perhaps you could ponder the maxim my friend and I developed in 1987, considering some of the couples that we knew: never try to understand in ways of the heart. Sure it’s trite (we were only 17, give us a break) but fundamentally true and worthwhile remembering.

The book is full of considerations on human nature and the functions of society. Forster’s voice is ultimately a compassionate one, often shining the best possible light on the actions of decisions of his characters, while suggesting other interpretations. His omniscient narrator is quite a chatty type, bobbing in occasionally to address us directly. And the ending is not so much foreshadowed as advertised as ‘coming soon!’ But accidents and incidents in life seen in hindsight often seem that way. A car accident, seemingly the action of a moment, is in fact the result of many small, everyday decisions – to leave home at that point and not a minute later, take this route instead of this one, let this car in or not - that leaves two cars at the same point at the same time. Let any of the preceding decisions change and the accident doesn’t happen, a fact you can ponder standing by your car waiting for the tow truck, a taxi and a policeman. And so the tragedy at the end of the novel is the result of various minor twists and small decisions that end up in a moment that brings ruin to one family and death to another. We are all connected in the end. Woe to us who forget it.

"There’s something kinda eeurrrgh about a boy who doesn’t like baseball." Summerland by Michael Chabon

Baseball has a place in the American psyche like that of cricket in the English – or the Australian - psyche. Maybe it’s more like the Indian. In any case, baseball represents a purer more innocent America, of freckle-faced children playing scratch games in the parks and yards before Mom calls them home for pot roast and apple pie, which is why scandals like the Black Sox throwing the World Series, or the more recent steroid scandals have the power to shock a jaded population.

Baseball figures heavily in American art, literature and movies; the Blocksox scandal is referenced in The Great Gatsby. Two of the most successful baseball movies I can recall were Field of Dreams and The Natural. The latter film changed the downbeat ending of the original Bernard Malamud novel to a crowd-pleasing upbeat ending, which I and millions of others loved. The former has the reputation of a film that makes men cry. Both films tap into something more than just baseball stories: father-son relationships, chasing a dream, second chances and greater powers beyond our rational world. Field of Dreams makes me cry, but it’s the character played by Burt Lancaster that does it. Lancaster is a small-town doctor who lost his first chance to play the big leagues as a kid, and abandons his mystical second chance to save a little girl’s life. Kevin Costner’s character says to him of his missed opportunity, his five minutes in the Major Leagues, that some men would consider it a tragedy.  Lancaster replies ‘Son, if I had only gotten to be doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy’. That moment never fails to have me tearing up, even now as I write about it. My Dad, still alive and kicking, was a doctor and is a lifelong cricket fan and player, though he never threatened state or national selection. You would never mistake my Dad for Burt Lancaster, but the spirit of that line is one he would share.

Michael Chabon’s 2002 novel Summerland is an attempt to create a particularly American mythology based on mixing liberal doses of baseball with Native American and Norse mythology, and American folklore (and fakelore) aimed primarily at ‘young adults’.  A boy, the worst baseball player in his little league (I had a lot of sympathy with him), joins forces with a girl from his team, an American baseball-playing fairy, a werefox , a sasquatch, a giant and a wererat  - and others - to save his father and not one but three worlds from the destructive trickster Coyote. Even in that brief synopsis you can see the problem. Chabon tries to cram as much as he can into this long book but for me it never gels. The elements never quite mix and we are left with a lot of nice ideas, good characters and story elements that never coalesce into a satisfying whole. J R R Tolkein criticised C S Lewis for cramming too many mythologies carelessly into Narnia. If you can see the seams in Narnia, you can spot the fraying threads in Summerland.

Another major problem is baseball. A lot of the mythology Chabon creates centres on baseball but the game itself doesn’t have a function. A lot of baseball is played but little is achieved by doing so. At most, the plot depends on sidebets on the game.  I was reminded of Douglas Adams’ Life the Universe and Everything where it is revealed that cricket is a faint race memory of the most destructive war in the history of the universe, the Krikkitt Wars, and the climax of the book is a game of cricket that could destroy the universe.  In Summerland, the destruction of the universe is a sidebet on the final game. There is an incident that brings on the climax, but it’s contrived and unorganic, almost literally deux ex machina. The mythology is supposed to be centred on baseball but the baseball feels tacked on.

And despite Chabon’s lyrical description of the games, you need a fair bit of knowledge before you embark, of terminology, tactics and jargon. It is a mark of the cultural domination of the States that I know who Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth and many other famous baseball players are, despite never watching a game of baseball. But my ignorance of the game is profound. I had to look up ‘designated hitter’ in Wikipedia to understand one of Chabon’s jokes. 

Neil Gaiman created an American mythology in American Gods, finding a spiritual equivalent of the history of the United States through old world and new world gods fighting it out in the American heartland. Gaiman too loves to fill his books with strands from many traditions of myth and legend but the end result is like one of those old picture puzzles, with faces and objects hidden among painstaking woodcuts of trees, mountains and skies. Chabon has given us a collage put together in haste.

1. The book sold well in the States but I doubt it sold well anywhere else. I think if you believed in baseball like Chabon, and shared his knowledge of the game, you would find this book more enjoyable and more satisfying. Yet I loved both The Natural and Field of Dreams. Summerland, however, never gets beyond appealing to the baseball lover to find a wider audience.

"Is there a villain here?" Richard Nixon

Poor old F Scott Fitzgerald. Not only did he have an unhappy life marred by alcoholism, a destructive marriage, and a lack of appreciation for his genuine literary genius, I looked up his quotation about there being no second lives in American lives to discover people call him, on the basis of that thought, fatuous, asinine and plainly stupid. And this for a line found in notes for a novel that was never finished, let alone published. I hope none of us are so castigated for our unpublished thoughts.

Fitzgerald himself had no second act (or perhaps he did, but it was certainly a downer) but others have. Some people point towards celebrities but in this day of celebrityitus, I say, who gives a toss? If a celebrity can’t recover from a career disaster, it says more about the quality of their publicist than any reflection on the nature of American life. A much more substantial second act, if not a third, was in the career of Richard M Nixon.

Nixon, one of the greatest politicians of the 20^th Century, rose to become Vice President under Eisenhower, before losing the presidential election to everyone’s favourite political Rorschach inkblot, John F Kennedy, retired from politics to come back to claim the presidency in 1968, destroyed his own career through the illegalities and ineptitudes of the Watergate scandal, and then came back again to become a (usually secret and private) advisor to successive presidents on US foreign policy.

Nixon is a challenge to our simplistic 21^st century morality. Although we pride ourselves on seeing the other’s point of view, and resile from imposing our views on others and believe all things are relative, and generally become so understanding and sensitive and open that we create a society that stands for nothing and offers less, we still like to make famous people heroes or villains. People must be either good or bad. If we find one flaw in a person, we must condemn that person utterly. This prevents considering people as complicated beings and considering their actions and statements on their own merits. As the Onion Newspaper t-shirt states, stereotypes are a real time-saver.

And so it is with Richard M Nixon. There are those who want to sum up Nixon as a bad man or a good man, but this is impossible. Nixon did corrode the office of the President of the United States with illegal activities and cover-ups, actions with the potential to destroy the role completely. He was anti-Semitic (yet pro-Israel) and paranoid. But he also was intelligent, with a good analytic mind, a superb politician (no-one gets to the top who isn’t) and a good president, with major and lasting achievements in social justice and foreign policy.  If you don’t believe me, you might want to read Nixon/Frost by David Frost (with Bob Zelnick) his own account of the famous interview now immortalised (again, to be fair to the man) on stage and film. Frost has written of these interviews before and they are available on DVD. The account of the interviews while interesting does not contain, I thought, anything particularly new, but his assessment of Nixon’s presidency and his account of Nixon’s recovery and final years I thought illuminating and quite fair. What does come through is the amount of rigourous research and preparation that Frost and his team of US researchers put in, forcing Nixon to be honest in his responses through their grasp of the material and honest presentation. Like Woodward and Bernstein, success came though sheer hard work.

As Nixon’s career recovered to some degree, there were those who were determined that he should never be forgiven. One book I read, the name of which mercifully escapes me, was ludicrous in emphasising not only whatever Nixon had done wrong, but anything he may have done wrong, and anything he was ever accused of doing wrong, and insisting that was the only basis on which to judge the man and his career. That is as a stupid an approach as to say Watergate was a pretty minor crime (which in itself it was) and therefore was blown way out of proportion, as if the President using government agencies to cover up crimes of his associates is the sort of thing that Presidents, really, should be allowed to get away with. There are cynics who argue that Presidents get away with that sort of thing all the time. The fact remains they should not and US democracy would be in real danger if they did.

I was reminded of the John Howard years and people like David Marr and Philip Adams claiming that free speech was being repressed during his government, through their columns in national and city major dailies, as well on television and radio. Nixon was likewise accused of suppressing the media. His response: ‘[W]ho was repressed? My God, was CBS repressed? Was ABC repressed? The New York Times? The Washington Post? What about the dissenters? Were they repressed?  Were they afraid to speak?” Journalists I suppose like to cast themselves in a heroic light.

One thing I did strangely like about Nixon in this book was his inability or refusal to indulge in self-analysis. He would discuss his actions and the political and other repercussions but any time Frost tried to get him to indulge in a little psychological discussion he would move away. Maybe some self-analysis would have helped him resolve his odd personality, but then we wasn’t about to fall in the modern-day trap of thinking about himself so often that he could not spare much time to think about something else. Nixon was a politician who understood the people a great deal better than he understood himself. For a leader, that’s a good balance.

I’ll let David Frost have the finalish word on Nixon: To many he was a villain, to others a hero, to all an enigma. The excavation of Richard Nixon will no doubt continue well into the new century.

PS: I just found this in the Amazon website, a reader's (very positive) review of Frost's first book on the topic (link above). It's a good warning for us self-appointed experts;  there simply aren't that many people interested in Nixon's first post-resignation interview. Playwrights, movie makers, and millions of audience members would now I think disagree.

"Print the legend." John Mortimer/ Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde

One of my comfort reads is the Rumpole series by John Mortimer, and it is also one of my favourite TV serials. They are all available on DVD these days, from the more sombre original one-off television play to the seven more humorous series that followed. Mortimer kept writing stories beyond the TV adaptations, almost to the end of his life. Though vastly entertaining, they are far from flawless. The same could be said of their creator. I have just finished reading John Mortimer: The devil’s advocate, an unauthorised biography by Graham Lord. Lord is a biographer and writer with an impressive track record but I was worried by both the fact it was an unauthorised bio and the tone of the opening chapter: it seemed I had a hatchet job on my hands.

Biographies are tricky things, especially for the recent dead or the still alive. While unauthorised bios can indeed be hatchet jobs, authorised ones can be hagiographies, and it is difficult to judge which gives us the more accurate picture of their subject. As time goes by a more subjective view can often be obtained, but there are still those people that will always be controversial.

However, this book was not the book I feared it would be. It is a harsh judgement on Mortimer, at times waspish or bitchy, but it is also gives plenty of space to Mortimer’s achievements and those who have a more positive view of him. Part of Lord’s anger comes as a result of Mortimer first approving the book, providing two extended interviews, and then withdrawing his approval and trying to prevent anyone talking to the writer; censorship from the champion of free speech. It also has the air of a rejected lover; Lord believed in Mortimer’s popular image as an intelligent, cuddly, liberal, witty raconteur but discovered a darker side; immature, snobbish, selfish, mean and hypocritical. In the end I found the picture convincing – all these things are true. We are nothing if not contradictory creatures. If Mortimer was a flawed lawyer, flawed writer, and a flawed man, what is he but what we all are?

And certainly his assessment of his writing tallied with my own. Mortimer’s work, in novels, plays and stories, is wildly uneven. Even the Rumpole stories provide clear evidence of being rush jobs with little revision or care. I was so relieved when towards the end of his life Mortimer finally wrote the story of Rumpole’s first triumph, the Penge Bunglalow Murders, that the novel showed the writer and his character at their considerable best. That said, like Sherlock Holmes, we read the Rumpole stories because the characters are so compelling, even when the stories may not be.

I’ve also had a pleasurable few hours reading Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the dead man’s smile. This is one of a series that Brandreth has written featuring Oscar Wilde as detective. Brandeth draws on his knowledge of Wilde’s life and character, and evident love of Sherlock Holmes, to create a book that is fun and entertaining.  Wilde was a friend of Conan Doyle, who features in the novel, and Brandeth suggests here that Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s older, smarter and larger brother, was based on Wilde. It is the sort of theory for which there is no proof but if it isn’t true, should be, and historical fantasy fiction such as this is the perfect place to air it. Perhaps this is not a book for the ages, but it is one I thoroughly enjoyed.