Latest Readings (8 page)

Time having gone by since I fell ill, I have become reconciled to never traveling very far again, so I need a new routine for reading Shakespeare. I have taken to keeping a single volume of the Arden Shakespeare on my writing desk in the kitchen. At the moment it is
Antony and Cleopatra
. The Roman plays are my favorite Shakespeare anyway, and
Antony and Cleopatra
is my second-favorite among
those—after
Julius Caesar
—so this is a high-ranking event. I have just finished going through the volume line by line and footnote by footnote, with increasing admiration for M. R. Ridley, who brought R. H. Case’s 1906 edition up to date with modern scholarship: modern for 1954. I spent decades getting familiar with Shakespeare without resorting to footnotes, but it was a doomed forgoing. Eventually you must look at the footnotes or you won’t know where you are. It remains true, however, that the best moments hit you without benefit of clergy. In
Antony and Cleopatra
, T. S. Eliot thought that the line most worth talking about comes from Charmian when she dies: “Ah, soldier!” I have always thought that Eliot was right, and now I still do. Charmian has so little to say at the crucial moment, and the soldier, of course, has even less. But it is the way the words are placed. The handmaiden’s transition into death was almost nothing, a pinprick: and yet for her it was a revelation. How great the great poet was, to know that.

Shakespeare brings me to Johnson’s notes on Shakespeare, which form a neat and abundant little book,
Johnson on Shakespeare
, edited for Oxford University Press by Walter Raleigh in 1908; but you need a volume containing
the revisions made in 1925. Only a couple of hundred pages long but with something memorable said in every paragraph, almost in every sentence, it makes an ideal book for holding in front of your nose while you pace up and down the kitchen. Johnson is so good when he comments on poetry that anybody who comments on his comments usually has little to add. His gift for pertinence needs to be remembered when the reader picks up either of the two small Oxford volumes of his
Lives of the Poets
and is dismayed to find that so many of the names in the list of contents are unrecognizable. Johnson had good things to say about Milton and Dryden, but he also had good things to say about Smith.

Yes, there was a poet called Smith, and the details of his life were almost as little known then as they are now. But Smith had a certain renown for his poetic abilities, and Johnson did not disagree. Johnson said that Smith had all the talents, but achieved nothing with them. That observation reminds me of some of my fellow writers, when I was young, who were so gifted that they practically had to fight to achieve obscurity. Late in my life I still find it remarkable that they attained their aim. Johnson’s specific criticism, full of detail about technical points, abounds
with general topics that lead you into questions about the creative life. Nor was “Dictionary Johnson” ever quite the strict academician that you might have expected from his reputation for whipping the ignorant. He was just as much descriptive as he was prescriptive. He observed the growth and change of language for what it was: a living thing. “That our language is in perpetual danger of corruption,” he wrote in his Life of Roscommon, “cannot be denied; but what prevention can be found? The present manners of the nation would deride authority, and therefore nothing is left but that every writer should criticise himself.” All he needed to add was that unless you can criticize yourself, you are not a writer.

Naipaul’s Nastiness

A MODERNIZING
force embattled against his own background, V. S. Naipaul is the Kemal Ataturk of the Indian subcontinent. He has always wanted the Indian culture that he came from—by way of Trinidad—to be modernized, if necessary out of existence. Or so, for most of his life, he seemed to say. He rousingly, and wittily, declared himself against the caste system, but in his later days he often proved that he was still an unreconstructed Brahmin: once, at his home in London, a workman wanted his help in opening a window, and Naipaul telephoned his wife at her place of work to tell her that he was being disturbed, and could she come home immediately because there was manual labor to be done. Or so the legend goes: with him there are always legends, increasingly boosted, in the autumn of patriarchy, by his own testimony. He behaved like an autocrat to his women, and in 2008 he cooperated with
a biography saying that he did. Throughout his writing career, some of his most entertaining stuff has been written in contempt of the backwardness of the culture from which his family fought to emerge. He can be hilarious about just how little cleaning an Indian cleaner gets done when cleaning the steps of a government building, but perhaps the hilarity would be less hilarious if you were an Indian. Nevertheless, we read Naipaul for his fastidious scorn, not for his large heart. Like the comparably great Nirad Chaudhuri, he is supreme for his style as a writer in English, not for his profundity as an Indian thinker. His self-taught father—a minor local journalist in many ways even more admirable than his relatively privileged son—had shared the same priorities, if not the same talent. In a handsome Vintage paperback which I collared from Hugh’s bookstall,
Between Father and Son
collects the correspondence between the two men during the years when young Vidia was in Oxford, a scholarship boy like any other, except that he was an Indian. His father, his mother, and all his close relatives expected regular letters from him. This demand he did his best to supply, without even hinting that he had essays to write for his tutors and it would be a blessing if he could relax in his spare hours. But
the real measure of his stifling family context was given by what happened when a letter to him from an English girlfriend mistakenly got sent to Trinidad. It was immediately opened. The whole family read it and made comments. He was unable adequately to express his dismay. Later on he would get better at expressing it, but that was how his invigorating apostasy began: in the very aspects of close family life that seem to us so enviable, but which would have suffocated us had they been our own fate.

With these beginnings of his glittering career in mind, I have taken down from my shelves a copy of his
Literary Occasions
that I bought in New York in 2004, in the days when I could scarcely visit the Strand bookshop without spending a thousand dollars. (By the time the parcels of books reached London I had forgotten what was in them, so the whole deal worked out like Christmas squared.)

One of the occasions is a wonderful essay about Conrad, called “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine.”

Naipaul talks about Conrad’s analysis of the colonial experience. In doing so, Naipaul talks about his own colonial experience. And in reading Naipaul on that subject, I am faced with
my
colonial experience, and brought to realize how complex it has all been, this birth, growth,
and breaking up of an empire. And most of it happened so abruptly. After a few hundred years’ practice in subjugating Ireland, the British subjugated most of the world in the blinking of an eye. Now there is nothing left except a language, a golden coach, and a few pipers marching and countermarching in the courtyard of Edinburgh castle. Eventually we might even have to say goodbye to Scotland, and there will be nothing of the old imperial world left except ten square yards of sand in Belize. Naipaul at his best, as a writer of factual narrative, gives you the sense that the language itself is the imperial inheritance that matters. Whether I shall read
A House for Mr Biswas
again remains to be seen. More than fifty years ago it filled me with admiration, but reminded me too much of the house where I was born.

Movie Books

ONCE AGAIN I HAVE
read, right through the length of its hefty bulk,
My Indecision Is Final
, by Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott. The story of one of Britain’s several doomed attempts to have its own Hollywood-style film industry, it really should be a bit of a downer. Goldcrest, the British company in question, had one of the biggest hit movies ever,
Gandhi:
but it still went broke. Eberts was the executive in charge and really the whole thing was his fault, so why take him as an expert? Why am I always reading his book? Not just because it is one of the best books about the movies, but because it is one of the best books about show business in general. Many of us who have lived and flourished in show business are reluctant to admit that we have no talent for it. What we are good at is the arts: the strategic commercial sense that makes the arts possible is quite beyond us.
My Indecision Is Final
does a wonderful
job of analyzing how the movies need an industrial effort and that if you can’t do the industry bit you shouldn’t start. I suppose if Eberts had been really good at industry, he would never have had a catastrophe to report and the book would not have been written. But he was good enough at it to be able to lay out the relevant factors in a thrilling linkage of cause and effect.

Goldcrest made some good movies.
The Mission
is still worth a look, even if only because Robert De Niro is such a walking definition of screen stardom that he merely has to flex his jaw in a determined manner, while Jeremy Irons has to act his head off. Nor did
The Mission
lose money at the same rate as
The Emerald Forest
, although both movies taken together added up to yet another lesson (long ago learned by Hollywood) that you should never go filming in the jungle unless you can build the jungle in a studio. And then there was
Gandhi
, the dream product that won Oscars and made zillions: money and prestige, Goldcrest had them both.

But in the film business, prestige never earns enough on its own. The overheads will eat you up unless you can maintain a flow of ordinary product. In Britain the home market simply isn’t big enough to sustain a steady effort
for anything more ambitious than the brain-dead
Carry On
series, so all you can have is the occasional outburst of talented people managing to convince the banks that this time things will be different. Sometimes they are; Ealing Studios, for example, was the creation of a man of genius, Sir Michael Balcon; but just for that reason, it lasted no longer than he did. Avowedly aspiring to be something more solidly based than a one-man show, Goldcrest was awash with talent but it couldn’t do anything normal, and all too soon the dream died. One is faced with the sad possibility that the main reason why the book is so enjoyable is schadenfreude. It can be fun to watch such clever people run their heads into a wall.

The same might apply to
Final Cut
, Steven Bach’s book about the pretentious fiasco that was
Heaven’s Gate
, Michael Cimino’s fanatically authentic, and therefore hideously expensive, re-creation of a Wild West range war that never happened in the first place. On behalf of United Artists, Steven Bach was the executive in charge: a suit with a proven brain. So really, in writing his account of how it all went wrong, he was in the same position as Jake Eberts at Goldcrest. The book is a piercing character study of Michael Cimino, from which the reader is forced
to conclude that Cimino never had a character at all. He was a chameleon with delusions of grandeur. He lied like Hemingway—he invented a role for himself in the Green Berets in the same way that Hemingway invented a role for himself in the Arditi—and operated on the principle that if you disagreed with him about anything you must have been working with the enemy. But some of his delusions were convincing: hence the perfection of the trap into which Bach and the other UA executives so worthily walked, convinced that Cimino was a great film artist. To do them, and him, credit, he had already provided the world with what looked like proof that this might be true. His movie
The Deer Hunter
was such a huge hit, both critical and commercial, that he was hailed as an avatar.

Prestige and money: that dangerous double score. The paradox underlying the whole mad project of
Heaven’s Gate
was that the studio got into it because the executives believed in art. If Cimino had not been carrying his wealth of laurels as an artist, and promising to add to them, his big idea for the range war epic would never have got off the ground—or, at least, never gone on location. But off he and his vast crew went to Montana, where they had already set fire to a hill of money before a single camera turned. A
large piece of Montana Cimino bought for himself, on the studio’s tab. Long ago, Erich von Stroheim taught Hollywood how hard it is to stop a runaway production. United Artists might also have drawn on the example of the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner project, which was unstoppable for the same reason: when you have spent so much, it becomes impossible to write it off. But Bach’s rueful narrative is a demonstration of how it is possible to understand every stage of a disaster and still be forced to go along with it to the end.

It ended in bad reviews and an empty box office. I still remember seeing it, and feeling my life growing shorter in a way that I don’t feel even now, when it is. After the smoke cleared, United Artists was in ruins and Michael Cimino changed gender. Steven Bach went on to write this marvelous book. His book about Leni Riefenstahl is also very good, although I won’t be reading it again: her movies were monstrous, but so was she, so there was no discrepancy between aim and result, and hence no lesson.
Heaven’s Gate
was all lessons; and today, in its afterlife, it exists on no other level. The strangest and most long-lasting of the lessons, however, was that some of the critics managed to convince themselves that a shapeless movie—and not just
shapeless in its general outline, but shapeless from scene to scene—was some kind of masterpiece. There have been several attempts to resuscitate the reputation that it justly never earned. One concludes that in the field of movie criticism there is a sucker born every minute. Were he still alive, Steven Bach would have the grace to say that the same applies to movie executives. Since his book came out in 1985 I have taken pleasure in recommending it to anyone who shows signs of being interested in the popular arts, or, indeed, in any kind of arts at all.