"That wraps it up!": The Shroud of Turin

Many years ago, I read a book by an American scientist, an atheist, who was one of an international team of scientists who were given unprecedented access to the Shroud of Turin by the Catholic Church for means of examination and scientific testing. The one test they were not permitted was carbon-dating, as this process destroys what you are testing.

The conclusions of the team were that the figure on the Shroud was formed by blood, contained pollen and dirt consistent with a Middle-Eastern origin, and showed a man who had been whipped with first-century Roman whips, and then crucified and had wounds on his his head consistent with sharp thorns. In short, as far as could be tested, everything showed it to be what it claimed to be: the burial shroud of a man from the Middle East crucified in the first century in same way as Jesus. Beyond that, they could not say more.

The Shroud of Turin, whatever else it is, is a mysterious object. If fake, then how was it done? If real, many more questions arise. But no-one had heard of it until the Middle Ages, and modern carbon testing has declared it a Medieval fake. So much for that.

Ian Wilson is an historian who has been examining the Shroud and historical evidence of the Bible for some time, with many books and television documentaries to his name. In his 2010 book, The Shroud: The 2000-year-old mystery solved he claims to have solved both the major objections to the authenticity of the Shroud. It is, to say the least, a bold claim.

He only spends one chapter on the Carbon Testing, which seems a little slight, but then he can only raise two objections. One, that mistakes happen and other carbon tests have been subsequently found to be way out. But this leads to his more interesting objections: these mistakes have often been due to contamination of the material being tested. The Shroud has been burned, soaked in water, repaired, displayed in front of burning candles and is anything from 700 to 2000 years old, most of that time not nearly as protected as it has been recently. Mmmmmm. Moreover, the strips that were cut for testing were taken from the upper-left corner. For many years, when the Shroud was displayed much more often than it is today, it was held up by clerics, with one at each corner, and on or two in the middle. This corner therefore was one of the most contaminated areas of the Shroud, filled with generations of dirt and sweat and skin cells. It was the area most likely to return a false result. Which then raises the question, why choose it?Short of letting another part of the Shroud being destroyed for more testing, speculation is all that is left for those who want to believe.

But as I say, this is only one chapter. Wilson spends most of the book on the other main objection: if it is real, then where was it for the first 1400 years of its existence? His answer for this is to link the Shroud to another mysterious image of Jesus on cloth that disappeared some decades before the Shroud appeared,the Image of Edessa.

Yes, I'd not heard of it either. But accounts of it date back to the 1st century to the town of Edessa, now called Sanliurfa, in modern Turkey, where it was kept from around 30AD to 944AD. Its history, and journey thereafter, are quite complicated, and rather than summarise, I would direct you to the book. 

But unlike the objections to the Carbon Dating, this is far more convincing and thorough, even to the point of tediousness. There is much speculation and supposition, as you would expect on any object from the 1st century, but Wilson makes as good a case as he can be done. It would be more convincing, but for the carbon testing.

Leonardo action figure: coming soon!

But even if you don't believe in the Shroud as the burial cloth of Jesus, there are still questions that have to be answered. Why did other scientific testing, finding blood and other materials, tend to prove it authentic? Why did a Medieval artist choose to do an anatomically correct crucifixion when no-one, no-one, else depicted it that way? And finally, how was it done? Despite many efforts, no-one has been able to recreated a Shroud in any way that is believable or practical. Leonardo da Vinci has been mentioned of course, but the Shroud, even as a fake object, existed before he did. (One wonders how Leonardo found time to do anything with all the conspiracies he up to his hips in.) Even as a fake, the Shroud still poses questions for which we cannot find answers.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" John Le Carre's world

John le Carre’s name is always associated with a specific genre, the spy novel. But this has not stopped him from writing some of the great novels of the twentieth century. Given he was writing about one of the great facts of the twentieth century, the cold War, the clash between civilisations, the West, the Communists, the Terrorists, his books give an insight and ponder they way we were living in that era – and indeed, still live.

His greatest creation is undoubtedly George Smiley. Fat, short, old, academic, intellectual, and cuckolded he is indeed the anti-Bond. But as a Bond novel or a movie is an entertainment for a few hours, time spent with Smiley is time spent considering the nature of our society, its flaws, its strengths and what we will do to defend it, or what we will not do. Which are not ideas that evaporate quickly.

While le Carre’s plots are byzantine, the power of his novels come from what Graham Greene, in one of his spy novels, called the human factor. Who are these people who put themselves on a shadowy front line, commit themselves to a life which means that they can never be truly secure even in their own home, or competely honest with anyone? Which is why a story like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can be re-read even when you know already who that spy is. Le Carre loves watching the watchers, and he shares that fascination with us.

I have recently re-read what is known as the Karla trilogy (aka The Quest for Karla or in its latest incarnation Smiley versus Karla): Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. The first is easy found in bookstores and libraries due to the recent, very good film. The latter two it seems are either found in second-hand bookstores or in bulky volumes carrying all three novels.

I borrowed one of these from my local library, and it has two disadvantages. One, its bulk makes it uncomfortable to read on the couch or in bed, and too large to sit in your backpack all day if you want to make it your commute read. Secondly, one feels compelled to read them through one after the other which may become like having too much of anything, slightly sickening and leaves one, as Basil Fawly remarked, wanting less. This compulsion is exacerbated when you have access to the book for only three weeks.

Luckily, I was only reading two novels, and the tone changes between both. The Honourable Schoolboy ranges from London to Hong Kong and is mainly concerned with Jerry Westerby who is a part-time agent chosen by Smiley to follow a lead of Karla’s money being funnelled to a Hong Kong bank.  (Le Carre has said it would have been a better story if he had not made it a Smiley novel. Perhaps he is right.) Smiley’s People is a more intimate story, Smiley following up on the murder of an old agent, which leads to his second direct confrontation with his nemesis Karla. It does form a satisfying trilogy, all the more so because Karla remains unknowable, even to Smiley, and so the strongest conflicts remain those between friends and colleagues.

In the 70s, the BBC televised Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People, but The Honourable Schoolboy was too expensive to film, and though important was not essential to the duel between Smiley and Karla. The producers of 2011’s Tinker Tailor look like going down the same route. And I have to say, Alec Guiness is still the essential Smiley to me. While Gary Oldman gave a great performance, physically he is all wrong. Still I don’t suppose this keeps him or his producers up at night.

Le Carre’s novels revel in the moral murkiness of espionage, where the good man may have to do bad things for a noble purpose. And ultimately that man’s soul is a casualty of the conflict. In The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley states his faith:

          To be inhuman in defence of our humanity he had said, harsh in our defense 
          of compassion. To be single-minded in defense of our disparity.  

  

His political masters find this distasteful, and it contributes to his precarious position within the Secret Service. But if we can conjure with the idea of a just war, we may have to accept this as part of the price we pay for our freedom. And hope that there is always someone else who is prepared to pay it.

"Land it on a sixpence" Cricket and money

Cricket, test cricket, that is, is a game that engenders speculation and philosophy. It takes five days, has lunch and tea breaks and most of the action takes place a long way from you sitting on the boundary. Even if you’re playing, standing in the field gives you time to think. It’s a game of nuance: a bowler manages a maiden over, and the advantage has passed to the bowling team. By the same token, a batsman surviving such an over may have given the advantage to his team. And as such, it also engenders, for mine, the finest sport writing. Not that boxing, football and other faster paced sports haven’t resulted in good writing, but a good cricket book is something special. My favourite contemporary cricket writer is Melbourne-based journalist Gideon Haigh. His books are witty, informed, and driven by a love of the game.

Sphere of influence: writings on cricket and its discontents is a 2010 collection of essays, speeches, and articles Haigh has written for such sources as Cricinfo, The Monthly, The Spectator, Sports Illustrated India and The Age. The major theme of these articles is the rise of the India to the economic centre of international cricket, the ineffectualness of the ICC, and Twenty20 and its effect on the sport. These are all entwined issues.

Twenty20 is a great money-maker for the game, particularly India, where an entrepreneur took an English concept and made it into an Indian powerhouse. Other nations have followed suit, with less success. Twenty20 may yet be a dazzling flash in the pan, but India has bet its future on it, eschewing test cricket which is the ultimate test of a player’s talents and strengths. India has been the No 1 test nation in the world (although the method of determining that, as Haigh says, is obscure and complicated at best) but in its last tour of Australia was an example of diminishing returns.

The other problem with the tidal wave of money now engulfing cricketers is its almost inevitable handmaiden, corruption. Match-fixing was a blight on the game in the 1990s. Now we have spot fixing, no-balls at particular time and so on. Pakistan players were guilty in this instance. Poorly paid, other countries unwilling to tour their troubled country, banned from the riches of the IPL by India, is it any wonder that some of them were happy to take money wherever they could get it? Dodgy administrators and administrations, a powerless and petty ICC, ruthless and powerful gambling interests; is it any wonder the Haigh senses an approaching crisis? He poses a very pertinent question: does cricket make money in order to exist, or does it exist in order to make money? He thinks it should be the former, he fears too interested parties are starting to think the latter. And the consequences of that for those who love the game are worrying indeed.

And I see in my own profession signs that there are those who are moving the bottom line from an important consideration to the main consideration. One theatre director, convinced that ‘bums on seats’ should be the major driver, programmed ‘popular’ shows and almost took his theatre company to the wall. A university changed the Department of Arts to the Department of Creative Industries. It said it was a hard-nosed recognition of the nature of arts and the importance of knowing how to make money with it. Somehow, departments of Medicine, Science, Engineering, Law and Architecture, have never considered how to make money using their knowledge, nor recognised that at some point they would need to. To me it was a buzzword approach that signified the ultimate surrender of Art to Money.

If cricket and theatre are simply tools to make money, then we play and watch cricket for the same reason we play and watch theatre. And having done both, to lesser and greater effect, I can tell you we don’t. The play, and the day’s play, still need to remain the thing.

"It's the cover-up." Nixon in the White House.

I think I’ve read more books about Richard Nixon than Abraham Lincoln, which is a bit odd. Lincoln is often thought to be the greatest President, Nixon the worst. Certainly Nixon is the only President forced from office due to the criminal activities exposed by the press and his political opponents. He was paranoid, regularly lied to the press, to the people, to allies, to the Congress and anyone else when it suited him and assumed everyone else was doing the same. He dragged out the war in Indo-China, expanding it to other countries while claiming to work for peace. He was introverted and severely reduced the number of people who could contact him directly. He had ‘anecdotalists’ follow him around to spread stories that showed his warm side. He was without a doubt the strangest man ever to be POTUS.

On the other hand, he was a visionary, who created new relationships with China and the USSR. Some of his domestic reforms are still praised. After finally getting an end to the Vietnam War, it was rumoured he was to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He told his aides to withdraw the nomination: creating peace was his job. (Perhaps his conscience troubled him. In any case, I wish a more recent President had similar integrity in this area at least.) After his departure, he was able to recreate himself as an older statesmen with great knowledge of international politics, a reputation that was deserved.

President Nixon: Alone in the White House by Richard Reeves is an almost day by day account of the Nixon administration and gives a compelling picture of both the nature of that Administration and its head. It was a different White House. A shy introverted man, Nixon used Haldeman to keep people away from him, and received other’s advice on paper, encouraging, up to a point, those who were prepared to challenge his thinking. One of the few men allowed to talk to him was Henry Kissinger. Their relationship was difficult, both intelligent men with clashing personalities and egos. Yet between them they redrew international relations in the midst of the Cold War, an astonishing accomplishment by any standard.

The illegal activities that ultimately brought him down were in place almost from the beginning. On tape, with other people, he was crass, aggressive and stuttering. On paper, on his own, he was thoughtful, visionary and continually trying to improve as a man and a president. He wanted to revive the fortunes of the USA, and the prestige of the office. In the end, he seriously damaged both.

Oddly, he neither authorised nor was aware of the Watergate break-in until three days after it happened. If he had then turned his people in, he could have survived. Out of an odd sense of personal loyalty, he chose to cover up their activities instead, with well-known consequences. The major problem I had with this book was that it ends with Haldeman and Erlichman’s resignation, with Nixon’s own some fifteen months in the future. It struck me as a rather arbitrary place to stop.

Richard Nixon was a man of contradiction, brought down by his own demons and shortcomings. Had he listened to the better angels of his nature, who knows what he would have done, and how he would be remembered. 

"Father and son." Henry IV and V

Our picture of the English kings from Richard II to Richard II (which includes Henrys IV. V and VI and Edward IV) is largely shaped by Shakespeare’s plays. Thus we have the evil Richard III, the saintly but ineffectual Henry VI, the romantic if hopeless Richard II, the warrior-playboy Edward IV and the glorious Henry V. But Henry IV is oddly elusive despite appearing in three of the plays, two of which bear his name. As Bolingbroke he seems to have no inner life as he moves remorselessly to the crown. As king, he is always on guard, facing rebellions from within and without England, and even within his own family. It is not a role that attracts the great actors, and is overshadowed by Prince Hal, Hotspur and that great glorious force of life Falstaff.

But both Henry IV and V may well have been unfairly treated by Shakespeare. (And let’s not get into Richard III.) Henry IV overthrew a tyrant to the general acclaim of his countrymen, and through tenacity, courage, military prowess and mercy, left his son a secure throne, and set England on the path to Constitutional Monarchy. Henry V was both a religious hypocrite and fantatic, not afraid to go to war in the name of God and sacrifice common men to secure his own glory. So argues Ian Mortimer in his two books The fears of Henry IV: the life of Engand’s self-made king, and 1415: Henry V’s year of glory.

Mortimer, as I’ve mentioned before, writes exciting readable histories, and is not afraid to be inconclastic without being gratuitious. His books are well-researched and well-argued. Henry Bolingbroke is a rounded believeable character, far-removed from the politic and guilt-ridden character in the plays. His relastionship with his two wives, his problematical relationship with his eldest son, and his relationship with the lords and powerful of his time are all brought to life in fascinating detail.

The fears of Henry IV is a conventional biography in form, while 1415 takes a very different approach. He studies wills, diaries, letters, account books and other sources to create an almost day-by-day look at this crucial year. Sometimes this can became, I found, a little tedious but on the other hand it serves to bring the era to life in compelling detail. The Henry of this book is colder, more machievellian than Shakespeare’s, while still being a great king and warrior.

Mind you, Shakespeare’s Henry V, on a close reading, is not quite the straightforward hero of popular thought. Through the characters of Pistol, Nym, Bardolph, as well as Fluellen and Williams, we see the king as a powerful man who uses the little people as a tool on his way to glory. The ghost of the rejected Falstaff lurks nearby, and makes us query this man’s actions and rhetoric. Harry is a great king, but a great king is not necessarily a great man.

Having recently played in a production of Henry IV 1, which prompted me to read both these books, I wonder at Shakespeare’s great design of his plays. Shakespeare, I have no doubt, wrote on the fly, without too much revision or planning. But still, having written the plays covering the War of the Roses, he was then prompted to go back and write the story of the lead-up, from the deposition of Richard II. I wonder now if Shakespeare, as a loyal subject of Elizabeth I, didn’t see the deposition of Richard, the annointed monarch, as a great sin, that in almost Greek fashion could only be extirpated by the death of all involved, whether that involvement was their own or their family’s. Only when all the Plantagenants were dead could true peace return to the realm. It’s an attractive theory, attractive in the sense that it can never be disproved. But ‘tis mine, and I will have it.

"None so blind." AIDS and America

I don’t often have visceral reactions to book. Sure they can make me laugh, make me cry, but until I read  And the band played on: Politics, people and the AIDS crisis, I’ve never thrown up in my mouth a little. And it wasn’t the revelation of various more extreme gay sexual practices (which oddly I seem to have been largely aware of) or the descriptions of the diseases that suddenly were infecting young men with horrific results, nor the horrid hatred that was revealed against gays. No, it was the reaction of a bathhouse owner to the threat of closure.  For those of you not in the know, the bathhouses were places where gay men would have multiple anonymous partners, and as such were one of the hubs of the American AIDS crisis. One of the owners turned to a doctor after a meeting and said, “What do you care? We make money when they come here, you make money when they get sick.” Another said, “There is no evidence that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease.” Togther, they made the bile, or something, rise to the back of my throat.

The AIDS epidemic, as author Randy Shilts, says, didn’t happen to America, it was allowed to happen. Between “not inflaming the homophobics while not offending the gays”, government indifference, from all levels and all parties, scientists arguing over funding and credit rather than doing research, and gay activists more worried over their civil right to anonymous multiple partners than the lives of others, AIDS got a grip in America in a way that could easily have been, if not avoided, certainly minimised. It’s a book that will make you angry and saddened.

At the same time, you meet men and women, gay and straight, who were not afraid to tell the truth, to take on the problems of trying to deal with a disease that was either being ignored or denied, working with little or no support, inadequate or no funds, watching friends, loved ones, patients dying around them, fighting in the political, social, economic, and scientific arenas. Some of them ended up with the disease themselves but kept going. Some of the good guys are unexpected. For example C Everett Koop, a Reagan-appointed fundamentalist Christian, was the Surgeon General who treated AIDS as a public health issue, rather than a moral or social issue. It was late but it was something.

Some of the people are inspiring, some infuriating, some touching, some more ambivalent. The infamous Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas, deliberately was having sex without telling his partners he had the disease or taking any precautions. And yet, while he angers with his actions, he comes across sometimes as a tragic figure, tormented by chance and his personal demons. Although Shilts has been accused of creating a gay bogeyman in Dugas, I thought his portrayal was compassionate without losing sight of Dugas’s role.

The book covers the year 1980 to 1985 in detail, culminating in Rock Hudson’s announcement of his disease, when AIDS finally became part of the public discussion. Apart from the social and political story, it is also fascinating to read how a new disease is recognised, found, defined and isolated. And for a book full of science, technical terms, and government departments and acronyms, it’s quite the page turner. Its believed AIDS arrived in the US in 1976 with the Bicentennial celebrations. Before then it was already in Africa and France. Only in America, because of how it first presented, did it become known as the gay disease, with disasterous consequences worldwide. Shilts was the only journalist to follow the story from the beginning, and was uniquely placed to write this book. We should be grateful he did.

There is still no cure for AIDS, only treatments. As more young gay men, as I am told, are thinking AIDS is no longer a threat, this book may still be timely reading.

"Mon panache." Cyrano de Bergerac and history.

Anyone who has read Shakespeare’s Richard III and then done some research quickly realises that the play and history don’t have all that much in common. And that’s fine. Shakespeare was above all a man of the theatre who knew what sold, and if the play itself is a bit clunky and long, the character of Richard is always a favourite with audiences, whether he’s medieval and silky like Olivier, gothic and spidery like Sher or modern and slick like Ewen Leslie in MTC’s 2010 production.

Cyrnano de Bergerac is another historical character best known for the play losely based on his life rather than for himself.  Ishbel Addeyman has made an effort to change all that with her 2010 book, Cyrano: The life and legend of Cyrano de Bergerac. She insists that the real Cyrano is even more fascinating than the character. Sadly, she never quites proves it.

Not that Cyrano is without interest. He was a skilled swordsman, and did indeed fight 100 men at once. So the story at the time had it, even if there was no proof of it beyond nine hats lost by the attackers. Still, even if it was one against nine, that’s still a good effort tough to equal. He was a writer and satirist, inventing science fiction, parodying 17^th century French society with his tales of journeys to the Moon and to the Sun and the people he finds there. He had enemies who in the end murdered him – all by the age of thirty-six.

Addeyman goes further than the legend.  His cousin Roxanne was older than he, and it seems of no romantic interest. Indeed, Addyman thinks it likely that he was gay, with intense friendships and fight with certain male friends as her evidence. Certainly it seems he was never involved in a great heterosexual romance so who knows. It certainly would have made him even more an outsider in his society.

As did his atheism. At the time atheism was as daring and dangerous as some people seem to think it is now.  But she harms this finding by the sheer weight she puts on it. Having establlished this fact, she cannot leave it alone. Everything leads back to his atheism. In one chapter she starts talking about a mystery wound he has. This only holds her interest for a few pages before she’s back to his atheism. Too much of this book feels like filler and much of this filler is this.  She even claims the Jesuits killed him. Not with any evidence or anything, but he was atheist and Jesuits get up to stuff so you know, it stands to reason.

Which is a pity. There is some good stuff on the role of duelling in France and Cyrano’s attitude towards it, and violence as his life went on. His literary fights with his rivals are also good. He had difficult relations with his family, and would change his name to create a more aristocratic background than his suburban Parisian one.  Towards the end, he did indeed find a patron; one that abandoned him after the attack that wounded and eventually killed Cyrano. And he was proud of his large nose. All his portraits show him posing at an angle that emphasised it. I would have liked to read more about the man and less about the one, admittedly interesting aspect of him, that of his religious beliefs or lack thereof. But perhaps she has the same challenge that Shakespeare’s biographers have – there just isn’t that much material. Le Bret wrote a biography and there is his own writing and letters, but the rest is supposition and inference. Addyman may rely too much on this for mine.

She also makes one odd, glaring error. One of Cyrano’s pet hates was plagiarism, and so she thinks it is ironic that his fame rests on a play based on plagiarism. Cyrano giving Christian his lines to speak to Roxanne is not plagiarism, it’s playwrighting. She seems unsure of the meaning of ‘irony’ and ‘plagiarism’. Mind you, as Brisbane friends know, she’s not alone. However, she’s on stronger ground when she reveals that the play itself was banned from the US for fifty years, on charges of plagiarism. Rostand had read a play with the central device of the friend giving another his lines to woo a woman. His play was better but the charge stuck. And yes, Moliere did steal the“what the devil was he doing there?” scene lock stock and barrel from Cyrano.

But in the end, this is a rather dull book, which is a pity. The historical Cyrano and his writing do deserve to be better known than they are. But in the meanwhile, we could all do a lot worse than be commemorated in such a romantic, glorious, tragic play.

"The Unforgiveable Sin." Myra Hindley and the Moors Murders

It’s one of the more famous mugshots in the world – a sullen looking peroxide blonde with mascaraed eyes, glaring at the world, her eyes devoid of emotion. Or is she wearied, the lack of expression due to exhaustion? The woman is Myra Hindley, who with her boyfriend Ian Brady murdered at least five victims, including children, after torturing and raping some of them, between 1963 and 1965. At least one victim is yet to be found, still buried on the moors.

For many, Hindley was the picture of evil. We will never know to what extent she participated in the murders themselves – Brady and Hindley’s testimony conflicts on this point – but we know she lured the children into the car, was present at the torture of Lesley Ann Warren and watched while Brady swung a hatchet into the head of Edward Evans, their final victim. Brady never denied his activities, once convicted, but it was Hindley who received the lion’s share of the public oppobrium and hatred.

There are a number of reasons for this. That a woman could participate in such activity was much more shocking than a man. But as Carol Ann Lee discusses in her book One of your own: The life and death of Myra Hindley, it was Hindley who kept her name in the public eye, who claimed innnocence, who made public criticism of the parents of her victims, and who seemed to completely misunderstand the public conception of her and her crimes. Despite high profile supporters, her reception into Catholic Church and continued application for parole, Hindley died in prison, unforgiven by society. Ian Brady, who never applied for parole, is still in prison, currently fighting to prove himself sane, so as to give himself the capacity to suicide. The families of their victims still suffer, fifty years on.

What makes someone a genius is a mystery. So is what makes someone evil. There is no particular reason why Hindley turned out the way she did. She had a brutal childhood, but as even she admitted, no more brutal than that experienced by most children in her neighborhood. Brady’s upbringing too was uncoventional but provides no explanation. Both were intelligent and enjoyed poetry and classical music. They were aspirational, yearing to escape their working class origins. Look as you might, there is no clue, no ‘ah-hah’ moment, to explain Brady’s yearning to hurt children and Hindley’s willingness to help him.

It’s entirely possible that if Brady and Hindley had never met, then neither would have participated in any such activites. Hindley’s defenders claim she was under his spell, enthralled to a charismatic psycho. She claimed to be afraid he would hurt her family if he did not go along. But these explanations pale against her actiions both during the murders and after. She did not claim remorse, but rather innocence. Innocence! As if she bore no repsonsiblity for her actions. She wondered in public why the families of her victims were so unforgiving.  In a private letter, she suggested one mother should ‘get a brain transplant.’

This 2010 book is as dispassionate a book as you could hope to find on the subject. It tells the story clearly and investigates the murder and the mistreatement of the victims unsensationally. Lee presents Hindley’s version of events, but also Brady’s where they conflict and the story as suggested by the evidence. She captures the pain of the families and the police involved in the investigation, and its lasting effect. 

Was Hindley rehabilitated? Could this woman have been allowed back on the street without fear? But who would dare take that chance? It was Graham Greene who wrote of the strangeness of the mercy of God. Perhaps God forgave Myra Hindley, as she liked to think Being neither fundamentalist nor atheist, I don’t claim to know how God thinks. But I cannot blame those who could not bear the thought of Myra Hindley enjoying one day of freedom, after what she did to their brother, their sister, their daughter, their son. If there is an unforgiveable sin, it is hurting a child.

"The most beautiful corpse." The Broadway musical.

Musicals aint what they used to be. Their songs used to fill in the hit parade, and fly out of the shops. Now, it’s a niche market. Even mega hits like Hairspray and Wicked contribute nothing to the charts. Who above the age of twenty-five can name a song from High School Musical? No, musicals as shapers of popular culture and music have had their day, like operetta and opera before. Nothing wrong with them, they will still find audiences, new ones will be written but one can’t but help feel their best days are behind.

Such is the theme of Mark Steyn's 1997 book Broadway babies say goodnight and it’s difficult to disagree with him. The current great of Broadway, Stephen Sondheim, is over 80 years old now. His last show, Road Show, was a flop, and even his popular shows have always had difficulty finding an audience. Don’t get me wrong, I love his work but then I’m part of the theatre crowd, which along with his fellow Manhattanites, tends to be his biggest fans. Sondheim preaches to the converted. Indeed, apart from the operattaish Lloyd Webber and Schonberg shows, Broadway musicals are having a tough time finding audiences around the world. Big hits like Spamalot and Xanadu, entertaining shows with good music and one would think a built-in audience, died undignifed deaths in Australia.

Steyn is an intelligent, perceptive and funny writer. Sadly, he writes more these days about politics than music.  That said, he has a good idea of what makes a show, or a song work. Someone once said a critic is someone who knows the way but can’t drive the car. Steyn is a skilled map-reader, with a great eye for observation. He tells of the writers of A Chorus Line once toying with the idea of a sequel – what were all those characters doing ten years later – until they worked out of course, they were still doing A Chorus Line. Such is today's Broadway.

Broadway babies say goodnight is an irreverent well-informed history of seven decades of musicals. Steyn’s discussion of the first word of the first integrated musical Showboat reveals much about the history of the musical, the United States, and PC language. ‘Niggers’ became ‘Coloured’ became ‘Here we'. The last great revival by Hal Prince, which made its way to Australia, solved the problem by making the first reveal of the set so spectacular that audience applause covered the tricky phrase. All of which ignores the fact that Oscar Hammerstein II chose the word deliberately to make the audience uncomfortable for a moment, in a show that exposed the prejudice that was common in his middle-class audience. But if we ever went to musicals to be challenged, we don’t anymore. Which may be Sondheim’s problem. He is both muscially and lyrically the heir to the greats, Kern, Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter and Hammerstein. So why don’t the general public turn up?

As Steyn, and Sondheim say, the music means a show will last, the book means that it works. And Sondheim’s books are problematic. They deal with among some topics US-Japanese relations, the Florida land rush of the 1920s, canibalism, irrational obsessives, and pointillism, toe-tappers all. Others are more mainstream – fairy tales, marriage - but all are delivered with a smart-ass New York attitude. Steyn calls Sondheim’s ouvre all flawed masterpieces; a generalisation but somewhat accurate. Performers love doing them, but popular he aint.

Steyn quotes a writer saying Sondheim has also never produced a standard, a song that can be reinterpreted, jazzed, sped up, slowed down or in some way fooled around with. Singers all sing Sondheim with the markings he wrote. This is I think due to the fact he took the ideal of musicals to its apotheosis – writing songs and lyrics that are true to the character and to the moment. Earlier writers were writing songs aimed at the hit parade and hung on a thin story, such was the working aesthetic, and produced the great American song book. More modern writers who attempt the same – think ‘This is the moment’ from Jeckyll and Hyde – come up with bland vague lyrics and bore us to tears. I’d rather Sondheim.

The second volume of Sondheim’s collected lyrics Look, I made a hat: Collected lyrics (1981-2011) with attendent comment, amplifications, dogmas, harangues, digressions, anecdotes and miscellany, is out and I grabbed it. The two books were orginally planned as one volume and certainly Volume 2 had me darting back to Volume1.  Sondheim is not afraid to step on toes. He once considered Sunset Boulevard as a musical, but Billy Wilder insisted it should be an opera to fit the size of the characters. Sondheim maintains he was right. Steyn, coming from another direction, comes to a similar conclusion. The big sets on the Broadway stage made Norma Desmond small, and the director kept pushing her further and further back. “I am big” seems ironic, even silly, rather than gloriously, if deludedly, defiant.

These two, the critic and the practitioner, would have a fantastic discussion on the state of the art, if they ever got together. (See Sondheim Vol II for the difference between a ‘critic’ and a ‘reviewer’) They both sometimes reveal the effort they put into their work, which they would prefer to avoid. Both are sharp on lyrics, with definite and strong ideas on what makes a good lyric and what makes a bad one. And both oddly don’t like W S Gilbert. Well that’s unfair. Styen calls him a versifier rather than a lyricist, limiting Sullivan’s music in tight rhyme and rhythms, rather than using the music as a springboard for the lyric. Sondheim seems to hate his work findng it arch and forced, and says his pastiche of Gilbert in Pacific Overtures does Gilbert better than Gilbert did.

Both books will provke thought and argument, and both make you want to go back to the shows. The Broadway Musical may be dead, but the wakes are fantastic.

"Is there a doctor in the house?" Dr Seuss

They say, or someone said, that a writer is formed in their childhood. Which makes me worry, as my childhood was safe and happy. Where’s the capacity for art in that? Darn my parents for being reliable and loving.

Mind you Ted Geisel’s parents were loving and reliable too. His family went broke when Prohibition destroyed their brewery business, and he was once publicly humiliated by Teddy Roosevelt of all people. Being of German descent, he was chased by other kids during the First World War, yelling ‘Kill the Kaiser!’’ with real violence on their mind. So he had enough. Enough to make to make him the greatest children’s author of the modern age.

Ted Geisel is better known as Dr Seuss (which I believe he pronounced to rhyme with ‘voice’ rather than ‘juice”. Ah what would he know about pronouncing his own middle-name?) Dr Seuss revolutionised childhood literature and as such may be one of the great influences on modern western society. Not to blame him – many of us old children have forgotten his simple, powerful and sweet messages or imagine they cannot be applied. Dr Seuss is a force for good, more power to his work. He makes children want to read, and nothing can be better than that.

Anyway I don’t have to tell you about Dr Seuss, or Ted Geisel for that matter. The quality of his work and its importance (and continuing popularity) are a given. His life is of interest though.  I’ve just read Theodor Seuss Geisel by Donald E Pease. As the title might imply, this is a simple and straightforward telling of his life and work, engaging  without being compelling. There are other, bigger, biographies extant but this is a satisfying way to start.

Lewis Carroll’s childhood, according to Virginia Woolf, lodged in him entire. Dr Seuss’ did something similar. His first children’s book And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street was named for a street from his hometown. If I ran the circus takes place on a vacant block in the same town. But Seuss’ world was wilder and more wide-ranging. He created a character, the Grinch that for Americans and others I suspect is as big a part of Christmas as Santa. How many writers have pulled that off? Dickens may have been the last. He took on prejudice, politics, war, the environment, personal responsibility, society, aging, even death itself, and made them whimsical, lovely and memorable.

His adult life is not without interest either. He worked as a propagandist during WWII and some of his later work he said was to counteract the racist slurs he made against the Japanese and the Germans in that time. He then worked in advertising before finding his milieu in children’s literature. His relationship with his first wife Helen is an extraordinary story, ending in tragedy.

The other day I was reading this book and someone asked me if it was true that Dr Seuss hated children and only wrote books to shut them up. She was quite serious.  I said no, he wrote books because he thought children needed better books to read. But why would such a story start? I can only put it down to modern cynicism. It’s a cynical idea, and it allows those that have heard the story to ‘know something you don’t know’.  It made me sad to think of it. Trying to find pictures for this entry I came across pictures of the Cat in the Hat doing bongs and so on. Who are these people that feel that is funny? Or in any way needed?

They have yet to make a good movie from a Dr Seuss book and why would they? They have to expand a simple but powerful story and so fill up with fluff, poor slapstick and poobumwee jokes, because that’s all kids get. That’s where the cynicism is.

As long as we persist in having children, and expect them to read, so long will we need to put the call in for the good Dr.

"Shtarker! This is Kaos!" The history of Israel

I mentioned Margaret Thatcher as a good argument starter. Israel is another cracker. (Both in the Australian slang sense as ‘very good’ and in the sense of explosive.) People in Australia protest outside a Jewish-owned chocolate shop, which is owned by another company that owns another company that sells chocolate to the Israeli army, and chant Hamas phrases calling for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth and wonder why other people get upset. It’s a complex issue.

I thought Irish history both rewarded and was blurred by the long view. Compared to the Jews, the Irish are whippersnappers. And Jewish history too emerges from the mists of time and myth. Israel is condemned for the settlers in Hebron who forced out Arabs from the area, one of the most sacred Jewish sites in an area replete with them. But who condemned or even remembers the Arabs who forced the Jews out from Hebron before that? It wasn’t that long ago – survivors from that exile returned to force the Arabs out in their turn. And so it goes, tit for tat, this for that, an eye for an eye, back as far as you can see, and as far forward too.

Rich Cohen is an energetic vital writer. No prizes for guessing he’s Jewish. His 2010 book Israel is real: An obsessive quest to understand the Jewish nation and its history, the title taken from a tourist t-shirt, is an informal informative history of Israel from Abraham to the present day. It doesn’t excuse or condemn Israel but it does go a long way to explaining it. The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan, during the Yom Kippur war, which he almost lost along with the plot, called Israel the third Temple. Cohen agrees. His central thesis is that of the Temple, that was destroyed twice then transformed into an idea that could be taken anywhere. When Israel was created, the Temple became a physical object again, and again something that could be destroyed. 

The strongest characters in this book are the shtarkers, the Jewish tough guys from antiquity to today. (Some will remember Siegfried’s somewhat Nazi, wholly incompetant sidekick of that name from Get Smart.) And of all the shtarkers, Ariel Sharon is the exemplar, not only of the type, but of the history of modern Israel itself. A dashing commander in the 1948 Arab Israeli War who became the hero of the Yom Kippur War when he split the Egyptian army and against orders crossed the Suez Canal and saved Israel, it was he who as Prime Minister started the settler movement to protect Israel and he who later tried to stop it for the same reason, before being struck down by a stroke. It’s almost a three act play - a tragedy.

Cohen is no blinkered true-believer, nor is he a blinkered anti-Zionist. Israel is real and he tries to understand what this has done to those Jews who live there, and the others as well. He sums up the present impasse in a single sentece: We will stop building when you stop attacking and we will stop attacking when you stop building. Where’s the off-ramp of that roundabout?

Cohen uses anecdote, myth and history to weave an entertaining and thought provoking book. If you are interested in the topic at all, you could do a lot worse than reading this. 

"And justice for all." The trial of Richard Hauptmann

Here’s an odd phrase you still hear: positive discrimination. Those who use it imagine that putting a positive word in front of a negative one cancels out the negativity. In practice, I don’t think this is so. If someone is appointed to a position in part because they are black, female or part of another minority, it just brings out the same accusation as good old fashioned discrimination does: favoritism, people promoted beyond their abilities because of who they are, and mates looking after mates. It is supposed to force people and organisations beyond their prejudices, but often just reinforces them, regardless of the qualities of the person appointed.

Here’s another one you may not be familiar with: noble corruption. This is a phrase, I believe, invented by Ludovic Kennedy, to describe the process when police and other law enforcement agencies use the tools of old-fashioned corruption – faked evidence, forced confessions, mistreatment of prisoners – to do good; bring about the conviction of someone who they know to be guilty but cannot otherwise prove it. It’s a tempting idea, a clear case of the end justifying the means. But what if they are wrong? And what if, having done it once, they take the easier way more often, and with less noble aims? Noble corruption quickly loses its adjective and becomes plain old corruption.

It is not for any of us to look into the hearts of police officers, lawyers and judges and see if they are doing what they think is right, or doing what they think is wrong. Which is why we need to cling to due process. It has taken us a long time to develop our legal processes, with the aim to protect the innocent, even if it means letting the guilty go free. Not that it always works. Innocent people have suffered punishment before and may well do so again. This is regrettable with fines, but repayable. Prison time may result in financial compensation but where is the lost time going to come from, or how are we to repair the life? And if we have killed the man, the woman, what then?

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German immigrant (illegal, not insignificantly) who was convicted and executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr, the infant son of the famous flier. And according to Ludovic Kennedy, and others, he was innocent, railroaded by men who perhaps thought they were doing the right thing. To read The Airman and the Carpenter by Kennedy is to be outraged by the corruption of the American legal system. If Hauptmann was not guilty this is a travesty of justice. The important thing to remember though is if he was guilty, it still is.

Hauptmann was caught with a significant amount of the ransom money, and lied to the prosecutors on several occassions. But this is balanced against his alibi for the night in question, buried by the prosecution, the lies told by witnesses on the stand with the encouragment, and even the simple bribery,  of the prosecution, faked evidence (by police and journalists), bullying of the prisoner, and abuse of the system. At most Hauptmann could have been convicted of receiving stolen money. As it was, he was convicted of being the sole kidnapper and murderer. To even do that, the State had to forget their own witnesses, including Lindbergh himself, dealing with mulitple people from the kidnappers’ gang.

Corruption is insidious, and no-one is immune.  Lindbergh embellished his evidence, claiming he could recognise Hauptmann’s voice based on two words he heard two years earlier:“Hey doc!” He said he noticed a German accent, so the words got changed to “Hey doctor!” to make that more plausible.

Nor is this being wise after the event. At the time, knowledgeable people such as Clarence Darrow said the evidence was insufficient to secure a conviction. But the public were desperate to have someone to blame and so, I would say and more understandably, was Charles Lindbergh. Even Haputmann’s lawyer was convinced of his guilt. (He was being paid by the Hearst newspapers, likewise convinced.) The Governor of New Jersey lost his subsequent election after he tried to have Hauptmann’s sentence commuted to life. To quote Bob Dylan, the trial was a pig circus, he never had a chance.

Ludovic Kennedy, a British journalist, was well known for his championing of those he saw as wrongly convicted. His book 10 Rillington Place was instrumental in seeing Timothy Evans get a posthumous pardon. This book, written in 1985, has been less successful in that regard. And there are those who argue that Hauptmann was involved in the kidnapping. But what this book makes clear beyond all doubt is Hauptmann did not receive a fair trial. That is what our system is there for, to give all of us a fair trial if we should end up within it. Neither public men nor cheering crowds should affect it. It’s almost ninety years since Hauptmann was electrocuted to death, but these issues still affect us. Like peace, the price of justice is eternal vigilance.

"Without a hitch." Christopher Hitchens

Don’t read Christopher Hitchens’ essays last thing at night. Not that he’s frightening, it’s that he’s like Maltesers – you can’t stop at just one. I spend some night sitting up in bed, reading Arguably, a 2011 collection of essays and columns covering the breadth of his career.

And it is a breadth of subject as well as years. Reading some of the less-informed commentary on his death, you could be forgiven for thinking he had written one book, God is not great and had only one subject, atheism. Hitchens was able to turn his mind to many topics, cultural, historical, political and yes, religious. His writing is elegant, well-informed, witty, intelligent and compelling. I don’t think he ever wrote purely as a provocateur, but he was never afraid to offend nor did he ever curb his opinion to follow a popular line. He knew what he thought, and more importantly why he thought so, and was able to argue it lucidly and entertainingly.

Of course there are areas where I disagree with him. Oddly one day I met someone who knew I was a Catholic, and because of that, was surprised that I liked Hitchens. It was an example of a new intolerance I see creeping in. Just because I disagree with him on God, doesn’t mean I have to reject him and all his work. It’d be astonishly dull to read a writer with whom I agreed on everything anyway. Why bother?

But I was thinking of another topic. In 2002, Martin Amis (who with Clive James and others used to share a regular boozy Friday lunch with Hitchens) wrote Koba the Dread: Laugher and the Twenty Million, an examination of the reign of Stalin and the odd attitude the left wing has taken towards Communism then and now. He related a story where Hitchens told a story at a speech about his days as a Communist, and got a laugh. Amis wondered if Hitchens had related a story about his days as a Blackshirt, whether he would have got the laugh, or even been a working writer in modern Britain.

To me he raised a fair point: why do we still look at the USSR, with the Great Terror, the gulags, the use of famine as a tool of oprression, the twenty million dead (some sources would say more), as somehow all right, well-intentioned, while Nazi Germany is beyond the pale? Why is left wing extremism somehow not so bad, while right wing extremism is the greatest form of evil ever? To put it another way, why are we not as appalled by Stalin’s Socialism within One Country as we are by Hitler’s National Socialism? After all, to quote the political pundit Clint Eastwood, if you go far enough right you meet the same idiots coming from the left.

Hitchens didn’t believe this was so. He accused Amis of coming late to the information about the terrors of the USSR, and assuming no-one else knew about it either. I think Hitchens has made a similar mistake. He knew about it, and so assumed everyone else must know about it. And it still doesn’t explain the laugh – in fact, if they do all know about the horror of Stalin’s reign, the laugh becomes even more sinister.  But I believe there is an enormous double standard in our attitude towards left-wing totalitarianism and right-wing totalitarianism.

In another column, Hitchens supplies an example of this very phenomenon. He is reviewing the third volume of Victor Klemperer’s diaries. Third? Sure there were only two? Yes, two best-selling volumes about life under Nazi Germany, but a third volume, of life under the Communists in Eastern Berlin, could not get a publisher in the US nor as far as I can tell in Australia. And here it is! A book that tells of life under the Communists cannot get a publisher, even though the author had two best sellers! The interest, the market, is not there. We simply don’t take the terror of Communism with the same gravitas as we do for the terror of Nazism. And why that is, is a question of great interest. Hitchens never makes this connection, and so never turns his considerable mind to it.

But disagreements and argument were the stuff Hitchens thrived on. His work is provocative and entertaining. As a writer and as a man, he was courageous. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Every one is free to write those opinions and get them published if you can (or blog/twitter them). But it is only if you bring the comparable intellect, knowledge, and integrity that you can be as respected as Christopher Hitchens. I suppose he would have thought me a complete idiot, being religious and all.  But I too am sorry I will never again reading something new he has written.