"Come sing a song of joy my brothers." The Bee Gees

I have a friend who for all her positive qualities has trouble telling stories. Not that her stories aren’t entertaining but she does tend to think every detail is equally important. Which can bog the stories down a bit, or muddle the point. Still it’s a minor fault, particularly as I don’t see her too often and I enjoy her company. Indeed, as she is aware of this aspect of her story telling it’s often charming and fun.

I thought of her as I waded through The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb by Melinda Bilyeu, Hector Cook, and Andrew Mon Hughes, with assistance from Joseph Brennan and Mark Crohan. It was with some trepidation I took this book down from the shelf in the library. There are three Bee Gees and they have had a long career from early teenage years to the death of Maurice in 2003, which effectively ended the band, but still the book seemed inordinately large. Was there that much to be said about any pop group?

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised. Before the second chapter was over, both Barry and Maurice had almost been killed in childhood accidents, both before they were two.  Later on, Robin is almost wiped out by a truck. And they become youthful vandals and troublemakers. This was evidently a story fraught with incident and accident and who knows what else.

But then the story slowed down bogged in unimaginable detail. The Bee Gees started performing as children and their career continued for five decades. They also had a career as song writers, a career that started early and continued alongside their performing careers. It’s an important facet of their story. More than once, Barry Gibb and the others have said they would rather be remembered as a songwriters than pop stars. If you doubt me, read this book. This gets stated at least five times.

In addition we get a potted history of just about every band that ever recorded a Gibb Brothers song. Or played with the Bee Gees. Or musicians who played a gig in the Bee Gees band then went on with their own lives.  Not potted in a sentence but in at least two or three paragraphs. And the vast majority of pop bands disappear without trace, so this is tedious detail on bands you never heard of. 

And all incidents seem to require the viewpoint of all three brothers at least, if not their wives, families and business associates. Which might be useful if these views were substantially different but often they’re not. It’s more often reiteration than clarification or diversification. It’s like watching those all-star films where the contract states they all get equal screen time.

And we get press releases and statements, not summarised or effectively quoted but quoted in full. For example, Robin moves to the country with his wife and buys a dog, and as pop stars do, makes a statement about it. This may be of interest to fans, and the private life of one of the Bee Gees is fair fodder for a book like this. But do we need three paragraphs quoted in full on the dog taking to the country life? Wouldn’t one sentence do?

Not that this is not a story without interest. Three brothers creating a band and a sound that lasts for decades, producing some of the great pop songs, with break-ups, arguments, triumphs and low points, personal tragedy, there is a lot to be enjoyed here. (And compared to another family band, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees are the Brady Bunch.) Meanwhile, their song-writing abilities alone deserve respect. They once wrote three number one hit songs in a fifteen-minute session. We learn their method of working, keeping rhythm by slapping their thighs, they set the melody first and never deviate from it, which may account for the tortured syntax some of their lyrics can have. This should be a scintillating and insightful read. But the book betrays its origins. It’s written by a committee (this approach worked once, with the King James Bible, and never since) and started life as a blurb for a program for one of their concerts. You’ve read one of those blurbs. Now imagine that going on for 700 pages. Not that it’s a hagiography. The band and its individual members get criticised and this is reported fairly.

Its major fault is a lack of editorial nous. There is no sense of what the authors are trying to do except get every thing they know about the Bee Gees into one book. Statements and information is repeated. One wonders if there was a final edit. This book is probably very useful as a reference book but as a read it’s tedious. The index is quite good. This is not damning with faint praise – lack of a good index has ruined many a good non-fiction book.

I wish this book was better than it is. I enjoy the Bee Gees’ music and in interviews they come across as entertaining and fun. The ultimate biography, despite the title here, is yet to be written.

"It's not the voting." Natan Sharansky and democracy

I was a bit disturbed the other day by the protests outside Max Brenner Chocolates. Apparently this was not a protest against chocolate but against Israel. Max Brenner Chocolates is owned by another company, the larger company is a supplier to the Israeli army, therefore the protesters were not advocating boycotting a Jewish business but protesting Israeli occupation of the Western Bank. This is part of a larger campaign, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. This campaign seems to me to be based on a false assumption, that peace in the Middle East is entirely dependent on the actions of Israel, as if the Arab nations, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have no part to play in the process. In fact, I never hear or read of any protest against anybody else except Israel, which makes me worry about it on another level. Hopefully, I’m reading too much into it, that ignorance and the hope for an easy solution is responsible for these actions and not a darker motive. Indeed I give the benefit of the doubt to most of the protesters.

Possibly there is a one-word solution to the Middle East, and that word is Democracy. Anyone familiar with the history of democracy in general, and in the case studies of France, Great Britain and Germany for example, know that democracy is not easy to establish or maintain. So Democracy may be one word, but it is not an easy answer. And it can make things more complicated.

I’ve just read Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy; The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Sharansky was a champion chess player in the Soviet Union before his activism on behalf of Soviet Jews saw him declared a refusenik and exiled to Siberia before he was finally able to emigrate to Israel. There he established a political party representing all immigrants which, he is happy to report, seems to have outlived its usefulness. On the other hand, he was a member and minister in a number of successive Israeli governments. His life as a dissident in a totalitarian country then as a minister in the sole democracy among other totalitarian counties gives him a unique perspective. One can certainly argue with him, but you cannot dismiss him. As some people have tried to do anyway.

I don’t want to summarise Sharanksy’s arguments on the power of democracy to lead to greater peace, for fear of expressing them badly. A couple of points are worthwhile repeating here though. The way a country treats its citizens are an indicator of how a country will treat the rest of the world. That’s pretty good. Democracies don’t tend to go to war with each other. Try to think of the exceptions. Everybody is ready for democracy. For some decades at least we have been hearing that the Arabs are not ready for democracy. But the same was said of Germany and Japan and many more besides. And more recently, since this book was written, we have seen clearly that Syrians. Libyans and Egyptians, among others, seem to think they’d like to give democracy a go. Who are we to say no?

Sharanksky condemns the US policy of dealing with dictators for the sake of stability. They have turned away from human rights abuses for political and economic reasons.  With the USSR this was called  Détente, and people still look at it fondly. And it was not until the US under Ronald Reagan linked aid to Human Rights that cracks appeared in the Soviet monolith. No-one is suggesting this is the only reason for the fall of the Soviet Union, but when the USSR started giving more rights to its people, more freedom, it could not sustain itself. And dealing with tyrants for the sake of stability has given us people like, ooh let me see... Saddam Hussein. Look how well that went in the long run.

Democracy may not give us the results we want. We may see more Islamist governments, for example, take over from secular governments in the Middle East. But if the democracy is real, if the people see the benefit of living in a genuine democracy and being part of the world community, we should see a more moderate approach in the long run, from all parties. But who these days is prepared for the long run? The media certainly doesn’t encourage that approach and going by what I read on social media ie us, we aren’t either. Hence the search for immediate easy results.

All people crave freedom. The history of politics in broad terms is a history of the spread of power and freedom from the few to the many. If we link our foreign aid to human rights we can start to make dictatorships and totalitarian governments rethink the way they treat their people. It's a controversial idea, but it is one worth considering.

"Eve of destruction." Oscar Wilde on trial

Oscar Wilde was the first modern celebrity. He made his name in London without actually doing anything by dressing outrageously and saying outrageous things and being seen in the right places at the right times. Unlike most of those who follow in his footsteps, he followed this up with conversation, lectures, essays, poetry, fairy tales, a novel and most famously his four great plays, the last of which “The Importance of Being Earnest” is still acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies in the language, which revealed his wit, his philosophy and, dare I say it, his genius. He was in his prime, forty-one years old, on the brink of who knows what, when he landed in prison for two years of hard labour, a sentence which broke him, leaving him to produce only two more major works, a poem and a letter, both produced largely while in prison, before he died at the age of forty-six, homeless, broke and exiled. Most astonishly, Wilde was largely the most responsible for bringing this disaster on. How someone so intelligent and perspicacious could do something so stupid is the subject of much speculation.

Wilde was convicted of “Gross Indecency” a euphemism in law for homosexual sex. The evidence against him, perhaps procured unethically and illegally, was overwhelming. Only one of his partners, Alfred Wood, ever stood in the dock for the same charge. To his credit, he never gave evidence against Wilde, and suffered the same sentence. But it was Wilde who started the majesty of English Law on its path when he sued The Marquess of Queensbury for Libel.

John Sholto Douglas was the father of Wilde’s lover Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, and it was his attempts to break up their relationship that made him send letters and make scenes and write the fateful postcard. The argument has been made that one could almost sympathise with him – his oldest son had died in doubtful circumstances, possibly as a result of a homosexual affair, and so he did not want to lose another. But his paternal concern was limited at best. Queensberry was abusive to his wife and children, a philanderer, violent and a drunkard. He sanity was often in question, and his mania for pursuing his aims was frightening. Bosie too was capable of violence and madness, threatening to shoot his father, sending provoking letters telegrams and cards, meanwhile treating his lover as convenient source of funds. To a modern eye, the relationship between Wilde and Douglas, despite both their protestations, looks an abusive one, one man debasing himself entirely to the whims of the other who might respond with love or hate, kindness or fury, depending on his mood. In this maelstrom of emotion, fear and family, driven by so many factors, Wilde sued Queensberry over an almost illegible card left at Wilde’s Club which said, “For Oscar Wilde – posing somdomite” or “posing as somdomite” depending on who you read.

Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, has published Irish Peacock and the Scarlet Marquess: The real trial of Oscar Wilde, the first unexpurgated publication of the transcript of the libel trial.  The famous exchanges between Wilde and Queensberry’s barrister, Edward Carson are here in full and we can almost hear Wilde’s voice, witty and precise. Wilde was always said to be even more dazzling in conversation than in print, and this is the nearest we will ever get to hearing that.

We also hear Edward Carson, a brilliant barrister . In cross-examining Wilde, he often seems obtuse and flat-footed, yet he draws Wilde into one of the most notorious missteps in legal history:  “He was a particularly plain boy.” Read that in context, and you can almost feel the shudder through the public benches. Then Carson’s opening speech for the Defence is devastating. Where you think Wilde has been scoring points off him, Carson has been paying close attention and he marshalls revealed facts, large and small, into a damning indictment. Is it any wonder Wilde agreed to drop the suit before the speech had even finished?

But we get no nearer to the central mystery of Wilde, why he embarked on this predictably disastrous course. Indeed, Holland in his excellent introduction to the book says the one question he wants to ask his grandfather would be “Why?” W. A Auden, in an essay on Wilde’s De Profundis brings it down to Wilde’s unadmitted, perhaps unknown weakness, his need to be accepted by London society. He loved outraging society but as an insider, and Queensberry’s continued provocation meant that members of society could no longer pretend not to see. And once they all admitted what they knew, they would be forced into one of their “periodic fits of morality.” Perhaps his doom in one way or another was unavoidable, as the best dooms are.

There is a website devoted to the poetry of Lord Alfred Douglas, relieved that at last his poetry is emerging from the shadows of his role in Wilde’s downfall, and saying his poetry will be remembered long after his other role is forgotten. Fat chance. Douglas is at best a minor poet, mannered and arch. (To be fair, Wilde’s poetry is not much better.) His role as the instrument of Wilde’s fate was ongoing, one neither he nor the public were prepared to forget. In one trial (he was a serial litigant) he called Oscar Wilde the most evil influence in Europe on the young for the last hundred years. Yet one biographer called his love for Oscar truer than Oscar’s for him.

No, we remember Douglas only because of his role as Dark Angel in Wilde’s life. Would we remember Wilde as much if not for his downfall? Possibly not but he would not be forgotten. “Earnest” would still be playing, and his fairy tales at their best are beautiful. (My first Wilde was an LP recording of ‘The Happy Prince’ with Orson Welles narrating and Bing Crosby as the Prince, music by Bernard Hermann. You can start enjoying it below. My copy is still at Mum and Dad’s and I still love it.) Perhaps Wildean scholars and enthusiasts only would know his epigrams and essays and earlier plays. As it turned out, they found a wider and continuing audience. Aren’t we lucky then he suffered such a thunderous fall?