Robert Bolt--A Man For All Seasons (1960)This is, as everybody knows, an all-around decent job of a play. It reveals a rather conventional personality in its author the likes of which one doesn't often see in such celebrated works. And it is much celebrated, apparently even by tough intellectuals. I like it too, though its widespread approval by serious people is a little inexplicable to me based on their usual standards. The outstanding characteristic of the play to me is its solidity: solid writing, solid characters, solid principles and ideas. People don't get much of that in such a pure manifestation. They can't run it down.

Bolt takes a (Kenneth) Clarkian anti-deterministic view of the historical events under consideration here. That is to say, he thinks they err who attribute historical developments to impersonal and inevitable forces. Cultures, societies, economies, religions, are created and driven by the minds and activities of individual men, of which fact he argues many modern people have lost the proper sense.

The famous straitjacket in which the British class system confines the psychological development of everyone born into it seems to have attained its firmest deathgrip--on the middle class certainly--on the generation born right around the time Bolt was (1924). In the preface, Bolt gives away where he is coming from, and how good he feels about that origin, around fifty different times. After going on at some length about the dissatisfaction of contemporary people with their own selves and the emptiness one finds when looking to 'society' for any guidance in how to live--middle class laments if there ever were any--he lets on that he is attracted to Thomas More because the latter had "an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off..." He (Bolt) explains his metaphors and imagery almost too much to be credible. He apologized for his previous theatrical efforts thus: "Inevitably these plays looked like what they most resembled, orthodox fourth-wall dramas with puzzling, uncomfortable, and, if you are uncharitable, pretentious overtones." It actually starts to get slightly painful to read if you recognize the symptoms, such that I almost wanted to scour my bookshelves to see if I had anything by Noel Coward or someone who would never apologize to anyone--at least bourgeois critics and theater audiences anyway--stuck in an anthology to purge myself.

Then there is the page where this most earnest of significant modern playwrights states that he has used a "bastardized version" of the style recently associated with the edgy, irreverent, misanthropic and much-idolized, especially at the time, Bertolt Brecht. He approaches Brecht, who by the time he wrote this preface was dead anyway I believe, with more trepidation and reverence for his status than enthusiasm. He calls him a "very fine artist" (everybody thinks this, even me I'm sure) when flummoxed by an apparent inconsistency in one of his works. His strongest statement (at least until he has to confront the great master directly at the end), and therefore the one probably closest to his own position, is that, "Simply to slap your audience in the face satisfies an austere and puritanical streak which runs in many of his disciples and sometimes, detrimentally I think, in Brecht himself."

Contemporary scholarship and the internet of course do not lack for people committed to tearing down the image of Thomas More as "the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced" (Samuel Johnson). Some dirt has certainly been found, mostly related to his being invloved in heavy-handed enforcement of religious and political conformity. The "Star Chamber", which appears to have been an English version of the Inquisition, and Thomas More are frequently identified as having an unsavory association. Some have taken a go at depicting him as a generally humorless and cruel religious fanatic, which as a public persona is probably accurate, though in his time religious fanaticism was not universally regarded by men of learning as a negative quality. I think it counts for something that quite a few people who knew him when he was alive appear, by the accounts they have left, to have loved and esteem him and in a manner more than usually fervent by the standards of the day. He must have been one of the most extraordinarily brilliant people England ever produced, for even his detractors concede to him this quality, which is usually the first point of attack people go for when trying to cut somebody down if there is any opening to so do, which apparently with More is not the case.

Apart from this play, Bolt is probably best known for writing the screenplays for the famous so-extravagant-they-couldn't-be-made-today David Lean epics Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. The picture above is said to be Bolt, acting in a minor role as a general in Lawrence. In looking these things up I came across another Lean/Bolt collaboration that I had never heard of, but which I am kind of interested to see now as one of those colossal disasters of the cinema that torpedoe the careers of everyone involved with them so that they never recover afterwards. I am referring to the 1970 film Ryan's Daughter, the operating idea of which is the plot of Madame Bovary transplanted to World War I Ireland, which, being a very 60s kind of idea, is fraught with potential distaster right off the bat. This film actually has on the surface a lot in common with Barry Lyndon, now generally regarded as a classic, which was made in roughly the same era. Both were expensive and several years in the making. Both were period pieces filmed in Ireland, which was cheap and relatively unspoiled at the time, made by famous egomaniacal directors, and featured young American actors, who were regarded as lightweights by all reputable critics, playing Brits/Irishmen of an age long gone by (not as bad of an idea as it sounds, though--if the character is supposed to be a bit of an uncultured ruffian, a callow American might be more believable on film than someone with an impeccable training and background in the English theater), Ryan O'Neal of course in Lyndon, and a guy named Christopher Jones in the other film, whose performance was evidently so bad that he went from playing a leading role in a big-budget epic at age 29 to never working in Hollywood ever again. This is like being the Rich Kotite of cinema. Not to mention, could there have been a worse time for a good-looking, not extraordinarily talented young man to be sent packing from Hollywood than in 1970? I'm thinking specifically about the incredible sex and drugs parties of the era immediately ensuing here. David Lean, who had been cranking out popular and acclaimed movies for almost 30 years, was pretty much finished after this bomb, making one more movie 14 years later and then calling it a career. Bolt, who would only have been in his mid-40s at the time, kept working, but none of his later work seem to have either made any resonance in the popular culture or scaled the walls of the fortress Literature compared to his 1960-66 work.

This is not exactly related, but another really terrible movie that I nonetheless find myself attracted to is a 1960 film called From the Terrace which for some reason they used to show on AMC all the time. It stars Paul Newman as a young lawyer in a super-waspy firm closed to anybody without the absolutely proper bloodlines, lots of drinking and smoking, unhappy marriages, affairs (and I do like the girl Newman has his affair with, I really do), sexism, bigotry, etc, kind of like Mad Men in other words, only we aren't supposed to think it's all horrible and count our blessings that it's all going to end soon. In this film (which I saw described once as something "only a dinosaur Republican could love"), I'm not sure we're supposed to think anything that we would recognize as horrible now actually is horrible. Even with regard to the affairs the mistresses are far more sympathetic than the wives. It's the incredibly privileged male character we are intended to sympathize with, I presume for the compromises and boredom one has to endure to make it in one of the top law firms in New York city. In addition to being a complete moral train wreck, it is quite poorly written. It is based on a novel by the alcoholic, socially resentful, always 30 years behind current literary trends, forever getting picked on by cool writers like Hemingway (who even considered his alcoholism to be of the conventional and uninteresting variety), Pottsville, Pa native John O'Hara, who was so deluded that he frequently let slip that he considered himself a contender for the Nobel Prize (by the way, this doesn't mean I personally think he was a bad writer; I am just observing that many of the writers of his time who are canonized now were absolutely brutal to him). Obviously I find its attitudes and assumptions to be rather fascinating. And Barbara Eden, who I have always secretly thought was pretty hot stuff, had a small role in it too.


I admit I had avoided seeing the famous movie of AMFAS for years because it seemed rather staid and self-serious, and while it is those things, it is pretty good. I hadn't realized what an all-star cast it had. Yes, that is an already corpulent Orson Welles playing Cardinal Wolsey. Wendy Hiller, whom I have praised for her work in films of George Bernard Shaw's work, is here, much older, as Thomas More's wife. Susannah York, another of my favorite blonde babes from the 60s, who very beautifully portrayed Sophie Western in Tom Jones, plays More's super-brilliant, classically educated, and, oh yes, impeccably and impossibly gorgeous daughter (the Mores are really a kind of the ideal liberal arts family, which probably helps account for their popularity in the mass college as self-actualization-mad 60s). Paul Scofield, the actor who played Thomas More both on the stage and screen, died last year, and several of the obituaries I read lamented that as one of the great stage actors of his generation who didn't do much film work, most people would only know of him from this movie. He was also in the WWII action film The Train, starring opposite Burt Lancaster as an insane art-loving Nazi general who tries to plunder the cultural treasures of France for his private collection in the waning days of the war, a fundamentally absurd role which he did well with.

Also this movie talk reminds of all the old arguments in the 20s and 30s of the perfidious effects mass market, mechanical, canned entertainment--movies, recorded music, radio programming, etc--would have on the human spirit. The argument, essentially, which goes back to Ruskin and probably back to Blake and the Romantic authors at least, was that there could no longer be one, and that therefore the current social and economic order would have to be otherthrown so that people would become human again, would gambol in nature, women would be earthy and fertile, men vigorous and keen of perception, the influence of flaccid intellectuals would wither. We would be like the Greeks and Etruscans again. Lots of beauty, lots of good, worthy sex, lots of original art, lots of individual wholeness. And the peak oil apocalysts and their ilk are still saying more or less the same thing now (usually without the good sex and the plentiful supply of meat, unfortunately; we grow ever less and less human all the time.

(Super) Quick Hits

Because now that I'm an experienced blogger I just can't bother anymore with developing my thoughts at length.

I think the predictions I have seen that in fifty years New Hampshire will have the climate that Virginia has now are not plausible unless the pace of change starts picking up considerably. Having lived in both places, the contrast between the two places in the extent and duration of coldness especially is pretty vast. While is true that the weather seems to be trending warmer longterm, we are still a long way from Virginia-type winters. While the difference in average temperatures may not seem that far apart over the course of a year, the extremes are markedly different. Whereas the temperature in NH would formerly go below 0 40-50 days a year and below -20 10-20 days a years, now it is below 0 10-20 days a year and only very rarely below -20. In Virginia it almost never gets colder than 10-15 above at the worst. Similarly the lakes and rivers in NH are frozen for a significantly shorter period, 10-20 days in some cases, than they used to be 60 years ago, but they are still frozen for a good 90-100 or so days a year. In Virginia a solidly frozen river even for a single day is a once every several decades event. A permanent change that dramatic in such a short time would, I think, be fairly unprecedented in recorded human experience. Perhaps it will happen, but I am not planning for it yet. That Northern New England will become more like Connecticut climatolgically in fifty years, I could buy. Virginia, I really can't.

America will never have an adequate general education system until there is once again a certain level of credible intellectual leadership with a consensus on what people should know widely distributed throughout the society, leadership in which the effects of its own learning would be palpably visible and alive in the persons assuming this mantle themselves. These are the sources of conviction and authority, without which I am not aware of any enterprise that can achieve even modest success. Right now even the groundwork to provide any kind of sophisticated or deep education to more than a handful of people is not present, and is several generations from being built up in the populace in significant numbers again. The scholarly life is a habit, easily enough demonstrable to others when one really has it, but we have turned it into a theory, wherein we crave for others, but especially ourselves, to know things, but haven't got the least idea where to confidently look to go about getting it, or the inner resources to attain the goal.

The next really important, epoch-changing literary genius, I think, will have to come up with a vision of our modern existence that gives it some kind of weight, that gives it the form or appearance of actual/authentic human life out of which a real culture could actually draw strength from. I do believe such a figure, or group of figures, will still emerge. What form they will work in I have no sense of, but as long as language is the most common advanced way through which to delineate experience, some segment of the people will still require literature.

From the pre-blog archives: This is always a popular segment. When we were doing Shaw lately, I forgot to go back and look at my great insights into other of his works in the past, so I present them now. On Arms and the Man from February 12, 2001:

'Much more impressed with the play the second time around, the conflict between ideality and "reality" is quite clear really, I'm not sure why I wasn't "struck" by it before. I think it seems apparent that (GBS) is skeptical of the idealists, though I think he understands the need for these feelings--in his society I believe he felt their aims--and people's energies--were often misplaced.'

On Major Barbara from July 10, 2004:

'A lot of ideas to sort out, making for a very unique picture when one can view them in a sort of composite. I think the idea is that we can admire achievers and people who step on toes, etc, so long as they are not allowed to become oppressive and self-serving parasites. Consequently the masses ought not be summarily crushed out of hand for sport, but pity must be dispensed with. Religion does not appear to be dismissed out of hand, but rather recognized as one of the great achievements of the human mind and demanded to be understood as such. Evidently this "humanistic" approach will greater encourage political equality as well. Funny, more similar to Wilde now with the lapse of time than I had realized.'

An awful lot of things have to go wrong to end up with a mind like mine but, amazingly, they all seem to have happened, and to keep happening incessantly.

Now that we have opined, we can listen to some unremarkable to bad songs that I have stumbled upon lately. Someday I am going to have to undertake a study of serious music--maybe that can be the subject of a later blog, after I finally put this one out of its misery.

A very early MTV-era hit. Like the video, not sure why. Pretty good-looking chicks, people seem to be enjoying themselves, and not much posturing, I guess.

I have a policy of only putting up Morrissey/Smiths songs when accompanied by clips of vintage (pre-1980) British movies. So I have found one.

I must be having some kind of minor midlife crisis. How else to explain the circumstance that I have developed a (mild) fascination with the slightly freakish, quasi-lobotomized, totally edgeless Lennon Sisters, the proteges of Lawrence Welk, the Vanilla Ice (many times over) of jazz, and laughingstock of the better half of America (of course my grandparents, who were diehard Republicans--they truly formed part of the hard spine of Nixon's silent majority--were devoted watchers of the Welk program). Well, they are rather pretty, and there is something in the way they sing that I like, though it is amazing how any trace of any individual personality is totally expunged from these performances. This one where a responsible elder male of the white community breaks in to shut down the girls' foray into "rock n roll" is pretty amusing. If only more real fathers had done the same.

I wish there were a way to reclaim Judy Garland from being almost exclusively an identifier of unabashed gayness, because she can really deliver a song the way you want a song to be delivered.

Caesar and Cleopatra--Part 3

After the play ends there are ten pages of Shaw's own "notes" which attempt to address predictable stupid questions and misunderstandings provoked by the play directly, one presumes to avoid the agony of having to read discussions of them in every paper. These explanations are full of statements like "it will strike us at once as an unaccountable fact that the world, instead of having been improved in 67 generations out of all recognition, presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appearance in Ibsen's Enemy of the People than in Plato's Republic." Well, the world has a less dignified appearance in so far as the arts and literature have become, over time and the extension of their study and practice into ever wider and less exclusive swathes of society, less generally dignified endeavors.

This is nothing really to the point, but my wife found the film versions of Major Barbara and especially Pygmalion highly entertaining, and her views on the relative value and significance of the overall human condition in relation to everything else that exists aren't actually that much different from Shaw's own. Nonetheless she is not to be put on record as any kind of GBS fan. He throws out too many lines disparaging of the capacities of women that are not to be forgiven. Shaw was of the opinion, contrary to Plutarch and therefore most English writers on the subject, that "Cleopatra was a queen, and was therefore not the typical Greek-cultured, educated Egyptian lady of her time...I do not feel bound to believe that Cleopatra was well educated. Her father...was not at all a parent of the Oxford professor type." I suspect this is an example of him trying to unsettle the middle class playgoer's comfort zone with regard to the latter's own learning by suggesting that his ambered received wisdom may not contain a shred of truth. At a certain point of course, if Cleopatra is neither really beautiful, nor educated, nor cultured comparative to the majority of humanity--someone has probably put forth that she was a total moron to boot, though I am not familiar with him--the legend ceases to offer much possibility of dramatic interest, and the personal aspects of its historical interest are greatly diminished. I don't feel bound to accept this view of the matter.

Shaw compares Caesar to Charles XII, Nelson, Joan of Arc, and modern self-millionaires, which latter group consists of "half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity.

"...in civil life mere capacity of work...enables men...to distance all competitors in the strife of civil ambition. It was this power of work that astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of Caesar's gifts, as it astonished later observers in Napoleon before it wore him out...a prodigy of vitality." I touch on this subject frequently in these pages.

There is a long paragraph in which Shaw explains that in contrast to most historical figures whom he deservedly makes fun of, he believes that Caesar was genuinely Great, and the source of this legitimate Greatness lay in his being Original. "Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization...His lies are not found out: they pass for candors...He knows that the real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd...Having virtue, he has no need of goodness." I found many of these points to ring true.

"Indeed it is clear from his whole history that what has been called his ambition was an instinct for exploration. He had much more of Columbus and Franklin in him than of Henry V." The second sentence is another taunt meant to confuse the earnest masses, probably, but I included it as I love to pepper my posts with famous names wherever I can. The point is that it is true that the whole biography of Caesar is quite uniquely interesting from many aspects; I still find it hard to get a sense of what he was like temperamentally; for if he was a man of the sort I imagine him to be, brilliant and perceptive mixed with hard and pitiless and violent, this is not a kind of guy most people have much direct familiarity with anymore.

Are there any "great men" in the Shavian sense living among us today? I can't think of who he might be, unless there is a warload somewhere in Africa with a perfectly clear perception, a biting wit and a better education than all of the journalists who will fail to properly understand him. But I don't think there is, and such a character would be rather insignificant in the global picture anyway.

The edition of this I have was published in 1966 and belongs to a series called "Airmont Classics" ranging in price from The Call of the Wild at $0.40 to The Portrait of a Lady at $0.95 (Caesar and Cleopatra was $0.50). There are 116 titles in the series, of which I have read 36. This isn't bad, though when you figure every single book in the series is something everyone has heard of, it gives you a good demonstration of how much reading it takes to put a dent even in a list of long-established classics. The first five books in this set that I haven't read for example are Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Kidnapped, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, all of which are pretty standard favorites, as are pretty much all of the other 75 I haven't gotten around to yet. (By the way, R.L. Stevenson, Jules Verne and Jack London--all 0-fers).

I was going to link to clips of some of the movie versions, though none of them look too good. There is a '76 TV version starring Alec Guinness, who I believe has been in at least one version of every work of British literature adapted for a screen, as Caesar, and some woman who doesn't seem to get Shaw as Cleopatra (Where are you Wendy Hiller!). Here is the trailer for the '45 movie starring Vivien Leigh at least, which is slightly amusing. Fans of the TV show Rome seem to like the part where Cleopatra seduces Caesar, but I couldn't get through it.

Caesar & Cleopatra--Part 2

I am doing a second book report post in a row because I didn't feel like writing about anything else when I started this post last Thursday. I realize that I haven't undertaken any kind of longer essay-type piece in a while as I have become more accustomed to *blogging*. This is not improving my overall ability to either write or think however.

We are in Act III now.

APOLLODOROUS: "...when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

One of the highest praises that can be bestowed on a work of art or thought is to declare that it tears one's previous assumptions to pieces. This "one" I assume is never quite everybody, except in works of the absolute highest genius, like the Principia or something; in most instances I assume (one of my assumptions here) that the author or artist's truth is not wholly but just generally unknown, and that the fellow whose mental superstructure is being torn apart is a common fellow who fancied himself to be more clever and knowledgeable about the world than reality justified and needed to be knocked down a peg or two. For otherwise the critics and the intellectuals would be having their assumptions devastated so frequently that I would think they would have to lose all faith in them and cease to be effective in their professions. This is sort of what has happened with me. Whatever my assumptions are, I know far better than to imagine they will stand up to any rigorous scrutiny when challenged, and I cannot seem to formulate for myself very many that will. If anything, my intellect is at this point so shredded that I find I cannot even deal with actual ideas at all most of the time but am just looking at things like basic sentence structures, word usages, running themes across particular strains of history, and the like, simply to try to recover some base of language and cultural possession to enable me to live out the remainder of my days in some semblance of a human condition formed under some influence of noble and civilizing forces.

I had forgotten about the stage direction where a hook-nosed man looks longingly at a purse. It is certainly crude, as well as petty, neither of which however is uncharacteristic of this author in his descriptions of characters he holds in low regard. Shaw seems to have been pretty blatantly anti-Semitic, certainly by any standard that would be acceptable today. The main argument usually presented in his semi-defense is that he was more or less a general misanthrope, but this latter affliction, which literature at least often finds to be secretly lovable, is distinct from racial bigotry, which is certainly held to be a much worse wrong, either as based on faultier premises, supposing guilt, or suspicion, but peculiar to and by association with the particular group being demonized, and of which, of course, the bigot can with greater assurance claim and feel no association. I knew of nothing of this some years ago when I was visiting the home of a (Jewish) friend of mine, and blithely responded when the father, an old New Yorker, asked me what I was reading lately, Arms and the Man. "Really," the man had said, not in an angry but more an incredulous tone, "I didn't think anybody read Shaw anymore." Nothing at the time so much as set off the slightest suspicion in my mind that Shaw might be offensive to this guy. I just thought he was laughing at it (which maybe he was that, too). The tone however was just weird enough that it always kind of stuck with me. I was not really sure at this point where Act III was going, and felt compelled to record this in my notes. Caesar makes more idiosyncratic political statements (to the suggestion that he examine some letters which will reveal who is plotting against him, he replies "Would you have me waste the next three years of my life in proscribing and condemning men who will be my friends when I have proved that my friendship is worth more than Pompey's was--than Cato's is") and the act ends with a demonstration of the excitement alpha males like himself arouse in everyone around them when he makes a minor military attack that appears dangerous to the others in his party (and in which he easily triumphs) an occasion for spontaneous gaiety and even hijinks.

Act IV begins with a satire of a pompous musician which is moderately funny if you are in the right mood.

(Later) CAESAR: "...Oh, this military life! this tedious, brutal life of action! That is the worst of us Romans: we are mere doers and drudgers: a swarm of bees turned into men. Give me a good talker--one with wit and imagination enough to live without continually doing something." This will have to speak for itself.

I know nothing about food, so most of the jokes in the section about Caesar's dinner I don't quite get. He raves at some length about the greatness of British oysters, which I assumed was facetious, but my researches indicate that the general opinion of them is that they are good. He then requests barley water instead of wine and threatens to outlaw extravagances of diet when he gets back to Rome. Austerity of diet is one of Shaw's pet themes. Among other things, I know he was a vegetarian, and his funeral featured, at his own direction, a parade of various animals he had pointedly not eaten in life.

Why have Caesar denounce vengeance and violence? Because unlike lesser men he knows what he is talking about? Because he is great and different standards are applied to his character? Because human excellence presupposes, due to the overall baseness of the race, a certain necessity of unsavory action to move humanity forward? Because in Shaw's moral system, understanding and being able to explain your reasons for what you are doing is the most important quality, and is the only possible source of human good attainable?

RUFIO: "Tell your executioner that if Pothinus had been properly killed--i n t h e t h r o a t--he would not have called out. Your man bungled his work." I thought it might be useful to remember this someday.

On to Act V. Caesar has just crushed some enemies in battle.

BELZANOR: A marvelous man, this Caesar! Will he come soon, think you?

APPOLLODORUS: He was settling the Jewish question when I left.

Another pretty rough joke, if you look at it either from the point of view that the "Jewish question" the implication of which I take here to be "how to either render the Jews more or less docile and impotent in society (A) under question or find somewhere else (B) where they can go which will make everyone happy", could be considered never to have been settled to the satisfaction, or at least resignation, of all interests, or also that Caesar's way of "settling" questions, while breezily alluded to in the dialogue here, could suggest rather brutal connotations.

APPOLLODORUS: ...Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce.

CAESAR: What! Rome produce no art! Is peace not an art? is war not an art? is government not an art? is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain...

The interesting quality of these plays is that they are never earnest with regard to their ideas in themselves apart from the character who is speaking them. It is in the person and mind of the particular character only that ideas have value and merit consideration. Ideas are only important really in the sense of how they take hold in and act upon stupid people, which is where they become dangerous. A world where everyone was of fairly equal (high) intelligence and more or less had a good grasp of what was going on would, it is suggested, mitigate the effects any particular distortion of a human phenomenon could have.
I'll have to do one more on this.

George Bernard Shaw--Caesar and Cleopatra--Part 1 (1907)

I had a dream the other night that my wife had decided that our lives had grown stale and that we had consequently moved to Los Angeles (the chance of this happening in real life is zero). This Los Angeles was more like a wine-growing country or at least the back lot towns and villages in movies from Charlie Chaplin's era than anything like Los Angeles is supposed to be now. Being me, I naturally went straight to a TV studio to look for work (I apparently arrived in town unemployed), and all the employees talked in the exaggerated style of commercials and game show hosts. And I loved it. I was quite confident I was going to be offered a good position in the industry too--perhaps acting like a person on television?--based on these positive first impressions. I was thinking this was really a brilliant and invigorating midlife move, just what I needed. My wife seemed happy to be in California too. In reality of course I have never been to California. I would still like to go someday, but it strikes as a place you can't really go to on vacation and get much out of it, unless it's for six weeks at least. Probably you really have to live there for a time, and trying to achieve something that you haven't achieved before and can't achieve in the same way anywhere else. That is what people do there. You have to have some purpose.

George Bernard Shaw is a funny kind of writer to read today, about a hundred years after his heyday. It is easy to tear apart his political and social opinions, declare their fallacies and feel generally superior about oneself from the internet commentator understanding of the world, but from the literary point of view he was really quite brilliant. His plots and situations are truly funny and ingenious compared to almost all other writers. He was a great iconoclast, in a time when the whole of cultural life was dominated by icons and idols in which people had a lot invested, and it is this that I take to be the main object and value of his assertions. I think you have to be wary of taking much of what he says literally and seriously. I can pretty much be brought to believe in anything if it is presented well enough, but there are always several occasions in any Shaw play where I find myself writing "This guy is totally full of shit" or something to that effect. That, and all the doubts one has about this author's sincerity, decency, courage, that you either detect from the writing or see hinted at in the commentaries of other authors, aside, Caesar and Cleopatra is a highly entertaining--not to mention short--piece of literature. Take it to the beach even, if you go to a beach where it would not be wholly unreasonable to whip out a copy of G.B. Shaw. I think you could do this at East Hampton town beach in NY, Ipswich in MA, Rye and nearby state beaches in NH, York (Long Sands), Ogunquit and Kennebunk in ME, among doubtless many others. It's a very smart play, even if half the opinions or more expressed in it are dubious; indeed, it even causes one to question the importance of having correct opinions, or if these are actually possible given the absurd state of human existence.

My Model Hasn't Figured How to Pose the Cover of the Book For the Camera Yet. Which is why you see a struggle taking place for the positioning of the book. Act I begins with more irreverent stage directions than are customary. Examples: "Below...are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers." "The palace...is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace." "(Belzanor, a warrior) Is rather to be pitied just now in view of the fact that Julius Caesar is invading his country." It is thus established right way that one must be wary of taking anything seriously with George Bernard Shaw.

A soldier entering the camp in flight from a battle with the Romans ("I am Bel Affris, descended from the gods." (Auditors) "Hail, cousin!" states that their javelins "drove through my shield as through a papyrus." I thought that was funny.

The Romans seem, after some degree of consideration, to be an exteme case of a race of men that is more exciting to read about than to experience first hand.

There is an absurd exchange among the besieged Egyptians regarding whether they should kill the women to protect them from the Romans. At length it is decided that it would be cheaper to let the Romans kill them, because they would have to pay blood money if they did it themselves.

This Was a Picture of the Box of a Caesar and Cleopatra Card Game. I am surprised they do not allow it to be shown, as it would be good advertising for them. Who is more likely to buy this kind of game than the kind of person who would find this site distracting?
The stage directions for Act II, ostensibly laying out for us the scene at Cleopatra's palace, include one of George Bernard Shaw's most cherished hobby horses, a direct dig at the English bourgeoisie ("The clean lofty walls...absence of mirrors, sham perspectives, stuffy upholsteries and textiles, make the place handsome, wholesome, simple and cool, or, as a rich English manufacturer would express it, poor, bare, ridiculous and unhomely"). Bourgeois sensibilities never change of course, because such people, I gather from my reading, have no other distinguishing personal characteristics than what can be glossed from their possessions and their manner of ornament, so the observation can more or less be applied to the same crew in our own time and nation.

The part where Caesar's aide-de-camp Rufio "with Roman resourcefulness and indifference to foreign superstitions" dismantles the tripod where incense was burning upon entering the palace because it was in Caesar's way I thought was presented amusingly.

Cleopatra is 16 in this play, and Shaw writes her as a silly and totally naive (though intelligent) schoolgirl ("Mark Antony, Mark Antony, Mark Antony! What a beautiful name!"). I don't know how accurate this take is--my impression is that 16-year old girls from educated backgrounds in the Victorian and Edwardian eras were more sheltered from the sordidities of worldly social life than has been common historically--but it does add a degree of charm to the play.

At one point in Act II the famous library of Alexandria catches on fire (though something like this does seem to have happened during Caesar's invasion, the big and final destruction especially lamented by scholars, historians, book lovers, etc. occurred several centuries afterwards). Shaw presents the occasion as the notorious fire however, or at least implies it, and naturally uses the opportunity to skewer anyone who might be inclined to regard the event as some kind of tragedy:

CAESAR (on hearing from an hysterical scholarly type that the library is in flames): Is that all?
THEODOTUS (the hysterical scholar) (S.D. unable to believe his senses): All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?
CAESAR: Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.
THEODOTUS (kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant): Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.
CAESAR (inflexible): If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.
THEODOTUS: Without history, death would lay you beside your meanest soldier.
CAESAR: Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.

While Shaw may have (sort of) believed all of these things about books, I find it highly improbable that Julius Caesar would have been in quite as close agreement with his sentiments on the matter as this play would suggest. Do I agree with any of it? I agree that books and other entertainments--and if you are of a pedantic nature, even a work of incomprehensible philosophy can still serve as an entertainment for you in the contemplation of reading/understanding it, etc--often have the unfortunate effect of substituting for any other engagement in life. It is not clear to me that removing the books will necessarily force an improvement in the typical faux-intellectual's level of engagement with life however.
Reading much Shaw at any one time can quickly become exasperating however, and leads one to ask the question, O.K., so what did Shaw like? I was able to come up with three possible things that he seems not at least to have openly detested. 1. I remember reading somewhere that he liked Wendy Hiller , who acted in a lot of his plays, and was the female lead in the outstanding movie versions of Major Barbara and Pygmalion. She was very good at playing the humor, which she clearly "got", and without which watching a production of Shaw would be excruciating. 2. Music? His mother was one of those fanatical Dublin singers and music aficiondos whose passion led so far as to bring trouble to her domestic life, and Shaw's early writing career consisted largely of music criticism, so it was at least central to his view of life. He probably would not have liked this though. 3. Caesar, evidently, at least in that he writes his character as being a great deal like George Bernard Shaw himself, which is a high compliment from the pen of this author.

Shaw loves to teach lessons and set people straight. Nowadays he would probably be the host of a talk radio program.

CLEOPATRA: "Those Roman helmets are so becoming." This is followed by a discussion of Caesar's baldness, which of course only someone with the mentality of a teenage girl would think important. Rules of playwriting for the entertainment of a bourgeois audience #1: Exploit any popular and easily recognized cliches your subject offers to the full (See Amadeus or any other popular biographical drama of a Great historical figure).

Joan of Arc Part 2

Now I will write my impressions of the four Joan of Arc plays I have recently read. Although I am not connecting on a very immediate level with the whole Joan of Arc legend, and do not have anything to say about it that promises to contribute to the vast existing body of knowledge on the subject, there is always a fascination and thrill, you must understand, for people like me in declaiming on such classical stories as have continuous and widespread popularity among people with pretensions. When I was looking for these pictures, there were tens of thousands of images of the Maid to choose from: statues, movie stills, handkerchiefs, salt shakers, posters, medals. And yet in all my life I have never talked to anyone about this subject, or encountered one Joan enthusiast to my knowledge.

Anouilh--L Alouette (The Lark) 1952

(Note: the apostrophe on my home keyboard all of a sudden does not work. This is the one of course for quotation marks also)

I can only consider that I have half-read this, as I read the American adaptation by Lillian Hellman, which struck me as, at the very least, not getting the authorial voice of a midcentury French playwright and penseur accurately enough. Five years ago I would have made a day of going down to Cambridge, having lunch at John Harvard's ale house or one of those places that serious intellectuals and cool people never set foot in, buying a few liter-bottles of imported mitteleuropeen beer at the gourmet market and picking up a copy of the original. Now however I dashed into a second-hand store on the way to Brattleboro (I do like Brattleboro though. If it were a woman I would both desire to dance with it and feel that it was attainable to me to do so) for New Year s Eve dinner, wife and babies sitting in the still running car, grabbed the questionable adaptation and endured a witty observation from the bearded fellow at the cash register that I must have known what I was looking for. So you see how tenuously I am clinging to maintain the forms even of a provincial pseudo-intellectual.

Of the four plays delineated here, The Lark has the virtues of appearing to correlate most with the actual events of history, or such of them as seem verifiable, as well as being more about the actual figure of Joan (Arc?) herself in a more signifigant proportion than the other plays. Her trial forms the structure of the play, the great events of her career being recalled in flashbacks. The tone of the action and dialogue, while somber, is rendered rather gently overall despite the threatening and grisly circumstances; I wish I could trust my adaptress more, however. I did like that rather than ending with Joan reduced to a pile of cinders on the stage, in the translated version at least, there is a flashback to the hour of her greatest triumph, the coronation of the Dauphin at Reims. In this American version the play comes off as, if not affirmative, at least offering hope that life contains nobility, or the possibility of it, after all, which strikes me as an unusual and rather too neat position for a French artwork of that era. It is the sort of thing that would probably cause me satisfaction and comfort if I were to see it as a playgoer, and any theater that enables the likes of me to be comfortable...well, you know what must be said about that. If I ever make it back to a big city, I will have to keep my eyes peeled for a copy of the original. I know I can order it off the Internet, but...it isn t urgent.

Schiller--Die Jungfrau von Orleans-1801

Though Schiller is, as far as I can tell, still regarded in the German speaking world as one of their very greatest authors--as high as number 2 in some polls--he is hardly read at all, and even that I suspect in a very desultory manner, in the Anglosphere. His power, or perhaps it is his Romanticism (the Germans going to much further artistic extremes in this movement than the English generally did) do not register strongly in English to my mind. Five to ten years ago again I probably would have tried to at least struggle through the original to try to get some feel of the poetry; especially as I love plays written in verse, which is a method I think is ripe for a revival, and which frankly I am surprised has lain dormant so long. It gives a dignity and a grandeur, and, if done at all skillfully, a pleasure, to one's story that is much harder gained by plainer dialogue.

To give an idea of how big Schiller is in Germany, there are I believe 7 or 8 museums dedicated to him, mainly in houses where he lived, which incidentally would not constitute a bad basic tour of that important and to my thinking still largely mysterious nation: 2 in Marbach-am-Neckar, where he was born, 1 (plus his grave) in Weimar, one in Jena, one in Leipzig, 1 in Dresden, one in a town called Bauerbach. Here is the Schiller-National Museum in Marbach. This is not just a Schiller museum, but an archive of German literature generally (I think; I cannot find any substantial information in English on this institution), but still, it is named after him, it is in his hometown, there is at least one large statue of him on the grounds. The edifice is certainly most impressive. In Portland (Maine), where I went to high school, there is a very dignified late Victorian statue of Longfellow presiding over one of the major intersections downtown. This might be the only real monumental-type public statue of a poet, I mean where he is elevated and large and dressed extravangantly and is sitting in an expensive chair and so forth, that I am aware of in the United States. I cannot think of any others at the moment. I am not going to argue that there ought to be more. Such things are as they are. Our American poets perhaps do not strike us as grand or good enough to be statue-worthy, but then again good monumental statuary has the effect of making people and events more likable. On the other hand, how many Schiller museums will Germany be supporting and how many Schiller monuments maintaining in a hundred years? It is hard to imagine as many as it does now.

But to address the play: the liberties and Romanticism--Joan's falling desperately in love with one of the English leaders, her dying in battle instead of the stake--as are noted in every modern critique of this play, become too much by the end to hold the reader's confidence. The first half, before one is certain where things are leading, is engaging enough. I like the extended emphasis on the heroine's family and village life, and the nature of the setting in which she receives her visions, which was passed over more quickly or disposed with altogether by the other authors. I think a more sober or tempered Romantic treatment would work well on this story. Although Joan is more brilliant than everyone she encounters, she is not an intellectual, nor learned, nor anguished, nor emotional, nor in way real way intimately accessible in point of her actual character. She has always been understood as a symbol of a number of desirable and usually impossible human qualities, which is the essence I suppose of true Romantic art, as well as religious iconography, which ought to be taken into consideration in any treatment of this subject. The play is not rated highly among Schiller's works, and I did not get much more out of it than what I have related, so I will let it go and move on to the next.

Brecht--Die Heilige Johanna der Schlacthofe (St Joan of the Stockyards)--1929

For those not familiar with this play, it is actually set in the meatpacking district and stock exchange of contemporary Chicago, and deals rather obliquely at best with the Joan legend. The Joan character actually resembles Major Barbara more than the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of her proselytizing the wretched and the unemployed in exchange for a cup of soup are almost as if lifted from that other play, which, however, had the advantage over this one of being much funnier and having some cleverer ideas and twists of the plot. The various, neverending business scheming and manipulation of prices made my eyes glaze over pretty quickly, and reminded me of why the calls one increasingly hears from conservative and high-testosterone American critics for a new race of manly novelists to address the world of high-powered, ultra-competitive business rather than their own sensitive feelings and petty grievances is likely to go unheeded. The day to day action and conversation of the respectable business world, as well as its etiquette, its publications and the apparent inner lives of its protagonists are not simply uninteresting; most of this is deadly and inhuman, and as if willfully so. The realm of art has apparently not yet found the form or the attitude--or the necessity--to raise its players and issues to the level of high culture, such as great minds recognize when confronted with it. This is not something I am just throwing out. I have worried about this for many years, given the centrality and ascendance of business values in our society as well as the widespread sense that modern American would-be writers have holed themselves up in their bedrooms, terrified of and overwhelmed by the very vitality of their nation. Now I don't think it is wholly true that authors have ignored business altogether, though I concede the entrepreneur or corporate ladder climber is rarely depicted as a hero deeply admired by the author. And secondly, I have to say that the more time I spend as an adult around corporate and other self-consciously professional-type people, the Kafkaesque or absurdist approach to understanding the ethos of this world seems the most plausible option, which is I suppose what our author (Mr Brecht) is saying at some level too, though I wouldn't really know from reading him. I would be curious to see one of his plays performed sometime, in Germany (I have realized that I can best endure live drama, as well as opera, in the country and language of origin, in a setting that I can imagine to resemble that in which the play was originally performed; thus I enjoy the faux-Globe that was put up in London and the Statny opera-house in Prague [formerly in Austria, remember!], however inferior the experts assure me their actors and singers are, as if I could tell anyway). I am positive I would glean more of what I am supposed to be gleaning from that than from further reading in translations of this author. I am not of the school, as should be discerned by now, that lower and even minute levels of understanding, in inferior minds, of great works of art, are utterly worthless, least of all to the mind concerned, as some apparently hold.

Brecht still has his fans. Someone should get hold of her and have her write a guest piece about why she likes Brecht. I am old and conventional and not especially good-looking, so it's unlikely she would respond to me. (If my link doesn't work, which it probably won't, go to the meet-me page on Hotornot.com and search for women with the keywords "Bertolt Brecht". There is only one).

Shaw--St. Joan-1924

This was the most enjoyable to read of the four, probably because it was the only one originally written in English. I thought the preface a very good piece of writing, both as an overview of Joan s career and for the many ideas about the type and quality of mind she possessed that duller or inattentive writers either missed entirely or grasped at inexactly or without succintness. George Bernard Shaw always had very distinct, pet ideas about the world, such as that well over 99% of the human population in any age and level of society were incontestable morons whose thoughts or troubles were of no real significance, and he could not resist topical jokes at the expense, as he imagined, of the lesser end of his audience (one of the English adjuncts at Joan s trial for example argues as proof of her heresy that she claims her saints spoke to her in French and not English). Pound, comparing his writings about his native Ireland to Joyce, thought it necessary to call him a ninth-rate coward. This type of declamation is a characteristic of a certain brand of hot and quick mind that I have always been envious of; for my own part I can only say that Shaw's work has not, compared to the other, the sensibility of the totality of a human being, or an atmosphere, of, shall I just say it, the spiritual influences at work in human society and culture. How far that is a matter of courage I do not pretend to know, but it probably has more to do with it than it seems at first appearance, or that most people--most bourgeois, certainly--would want to admit.

I would write more, but it has already taken me fifteen days to write this bloody report, and I can't even remember the damn play anymore. Granted, I was away for ten of those days, but come on. My life is slipping away while I try to write one coherent idea about what I am supposed to make of Joan of Arc. And I'm not done with her yet either! I am going to give this up and start on something else. This will all eventually lead somewhere if there is enough accumulated mass in it, that I believe.