Fred Astaire

I saw Fred Astaire being interviewed tonight on a History of RKO films. At the end of the interview he was asked if he thought he was, at the time, making films that would be considered in later years to be works of art. He grinned in that modest manner he perfected and said "O no, nothing like that; we were just trying to make a buck."
Often works of art come from some crafstman's effort to do a job of work successfully. I am thinking of Mozart who was described by a learned musicologist a few years ago as a "jobbing composer". In other words he was just trying to make a buck.
I feel there are too many "artists" trying their damndest to produce a work of art regardless of whether or not it will be liked and enjoyed; they tend to think in terms of "how will it be received by the critics?" rather than "how will the general public receive it?". Sometimes works of art are produced when artists follow either of these precepts, sometimes not. As William Goldman said of Hollywood: "No knows anything." No one can tell if a work of art is produced by design or luck but if one is it is usually the result of a good deal of hard work.
I think it was Pauline Kael who was offended by the central idea of the film "Amadeus": that unlike his rival he was able to produce his compositions as if he were doing something easy. It is never easy. Which brings to mind the reply Whistler gave in court, when defending himself against the charge by John Ruskin of "throwing a pot of paint in the public's face", to the question: "How long did it take you to paint one of your Nocturn's?" Whistler replied to the effect that while it didn't take long to execute, it was the result of a lifetime's work experience.
He won the case.

John Buchan

When I was a boy in secondary school we studied a novel of John Buchan's; I think it was "Prestor John". I very much doubt if that novel would be studied these days, or even read, or even mentioned with its politically incorrect views on "blacks" and Jews and other matters which most people now find distasteful. "The Thirty Nine Steps" also has some of this stuff in it (if memory is correct) but it's such a fast moving story that you can read it now without lingering on Buchan's old fashioned ideas on race, the Empire and so on.
I think I recall that his publisher did not at first want to publish it, thought it slight (which it is) and without much in the way of serious ideas but just a chase story. Well Buchan was on the board of his own publishers so, no doubt, that had something to do with its eventual acceptance.
It is, of course, a fine read though I don't regard it as in any way a classic - except in the sense that it may be a classic in the genre of "chase stories", if there is one.
I still see Hitchcok's film version in my mind's eye with Robert Donat as Richard Hannay; he was more charming a character than either Robert Powell or Kenneth More, the first too much the English gentleman, the second too much the caricature of the English gentleman. Donat was, of course, Scottish (which Buchan was) and that might be a clue to his playing the part so well.
Hitchcock changed the end much to its improvement.
I read once (may have been in the book of interviews of Hitch by Francois Truffaut) that Hitchcock chose novels which were not very good so that he could do what he wished with them, not have to be true to the literary quality of the book. Did he have this in mind when he made "The Thirty Nine Steps"?

Pinter

Sean O'Casey said of Pinter's plays: "Pinter wears gloves so that not even a fingerprint is deposited in the writing."
Does he mean that there is nothing of the playwright himself in the plays, or that there is nothing human in the plays? Not quite sure.
His plays are a bit Kafkaesque in that characters are introduced, usually ordinary people, who are subjected to torments for which there appears to be no reason why they are committed. You can put your own interpretation as to why they are being tormented - is it real or imagined? Is the State involved? Actors like playing the roles because they can imagine what they wish to appear to be, and so can be mysterious and, therefore (in their eyes) profound.
I am reminded of what Arthur Schnabel said about playing the piano when I hear the word "Pinteresque", referring to the pauses he is famous for : "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where art lies."
I never much liked Harold Pinter's plays, though "The Caretaker" is rather good. "The Homecoming" is dreadful I think.
I saw "The Homecoming" in its first production on tour, in Cardiff. I recall there being a "box" with children and their parents in it. The kids laughed a lot during the play and I could not understand why; now I think I know the reason: the actors' response to a remark made by another is not to say the most reasonable or expected thing but the opposite - the least logical, the least expected - and this can be amusing. People laugh at Pinter's plays but it's not at the way the play is dramatically effective in the way Shaw, say, or Ibsen is; no, it's at the way it isn't. Which was why those children found "The Homecoming" amusing. The exchanges were, to them amusing, like those between two comics.
But the play is not amusing at all. I think Joan Bakewell, a former girlfriend, called it pornographic. I found it not so much pornographic as nasty with not a trace of humanity in it.

Recycling

My wife held in her hand a broken light bulb. "What do I do with this?" she asked.
"Throw it out," I said.
"Where? In what container? Black bin, green bin or green bag?"
I pondered a while then said, as if a light bulb had come on in my head, "Electrics!"
"So?"
"It's electrical," I said. "So it goes with electrical material."
"And where is 'electrical material'? Black bin, green bin or green bag."
"None of them," I said.
"So what do I do with it?"
"Mmmm," I said unhelpfully. Then the light bulb in my head shone brightly again. "Down the dump."
She went to put her hands to her hips to emphasise what she was going to say but the bulb she had in her hand made her think twice about it.
"I know what you're going to say," I said. I can read her like a book after n years of marriage (I've put 'n' because I'm not sure of the right number). "You're going to say: 'Do we (i.e. me) have to go all the way to the dump for us to get rid of this light bulb?' Am I right?"
She nodded.
I took the light bulb from her and placed it on a shelf in the porch.
This conversation occurred some months ago; the light bulb is still there on the shelf. I'm getting fond of it; between a small cactus and a cardboard box that has something in it (can't remember what) it looks rather nice - artistic, Damien Hurst-ish.

Adrian Mitchell

I was a theatre reviewer for a few years covering the Cardiff area. One production I recall was a pot pourri of scenes got together by Adrian Mitchell who was, for a year, resident writer at Cardiff University. It was watchable but not outstanding. The only thing I recall from it now was a group of people singing, to the tune of Zipper de doo dah, the words "Zipper de doo dah, zipper de ay, tell the world we are glad to be gay" - something like that.
Another more ambitious show he staged was loosely based on three artists, two of which I knew of, Bix Biderbeck and Hoagy Carmichael, the third person I can't bring to mind.
When Adrian Mitchell finished his year at Cardiff he said to a friend of mine who was, like him, a poet, "While I've been here no one in the English Department has seemed to want to know me." My friend said "Perhaps that's because you're not dead yet."
Now he is. I wonder if his work will now be taken more seriously by the department of English at the University.
An American writer died, can't recall who, and it inspired a journalist wag to write: "So and So is dead; great career move."

Welshness

I wrote a play, Horseplay, which won a competition but was never produced. I was close once when a member of the writing group I used to be associated with, a rather formidable lady of a certain age, took the play to The Bristol Old Vic and told (probably ordered) the Artistic Director to read it. He phoned me and I went to see him about the play. He was interested but it was, for Bristol audiences he felt, "too Welshy".
So it was - is.
There is an actress in Gavin and Stacey who, according to an interview in a colour magazine, could not get a job for a long time because she was told she was "too Welshy".
You can have a Midlands accent and be acceptable, or a Scottish accent, but not a Welsh one.
This girl is in a comedy and I wonder if, because it's funny, she can succeed because her accent is, to some people who aren't Welsh, also funny.
Yet Richard Burton succeeded, and Anthony Hopkins too. So....... ?
I don't have an answer to this riddle.

Pop Songs

In an army barrack room you sometimes get friendly with men you otherwise wouldn't want to socialise with. There was a young man, a few years younger than me, who had been a member of a London gang. He was not the sort I normally had much time for, but I got to know him quite well, we seemed to like each other, we hit it off. Rarely he'd talk about his experiences in London and rarely did I mention having attended university and intended to be a teacher when I'd left the forces. I can't remember what we talked about but he was always helpful to me and I to him. When we went our separate ways we lost contact.
One thing I remember about him was that if he wanted to say something serious he usually quoted the words of a pop song to substantiate his argument. "Look what The Beatles say in their song," he'd say, and quote something relevant - maybe "all you need is love".
It struck me then how potent the words of popular melodies were to young people, especially those with not much education, with none of the great poets or philosophers to quote from.
I recalled that bloke today when I read an interview in The Spectator that the editor did with Lilly Allen. She writes meaningful songs, she said; they meant a lot to her and probably were meaningful to others.
I have never thought that there much sustenance in pop songs; surely they were suitable for dancing to, not much in the way of depth.
Maybe I'm wrong. After all, there is no poetry written now that appeals to ordinary people; the poetry written now is written for a small elite group, usually other poets. I remember a pop singer saying many years ago that "we are now the real poets", and I'm wondering if he's right.

Van Johnson

A very likeable guy; you could never imagine him playing a villain. The sort of "boy next door", not like Rees Witherspoon, "the girl next door who can't wait to get out of town"; no, the boy next door who likes living next to you.
He walked heavily with a sort of roll like a sailor, so I could not think of him as a dancer. So I was quite surprised to see his name at the head of an advert for "The Music Man" many years ago in London. This would be after his great successes in Hollywood - on the downward path after great success like many actors who then trod the boards in America and London.
I don't consider him a great actor - I cannot visualise him playing any of the great theatrical roles - but I see him as a second star, a backup actor supporting a greater actor as with Humphrey Bogart in "The Caine Mutiny" and Gene Kelly in "Brigadoon".
His blind detective in "10 Paces to Baker Street" was not mentioned in The Times obituary: I thought that was one of his best roles.
It always struck me that when he spoke it was as if he was about to make a speech, somehow it wasn't a natural way to speak. This too I always felt about Walter Pigeon. The result was that neither could never debase the character they were playing, they were always a trifle grand in their roles. Neither would play tragedy. Nor comedy. They were both themselves. Always. Not dull but it was as if they were afraid of making fools of themselves.

Holidays

Dr. Johnson said of The Devil's Causway: "Worth seeing but not worth going to see."
I know what he means. Too many times have I travelled a long distance at great discomfort to see something touristically famous only either to think something like that or, worse, to think "Not really worth seeing."
Now that I'm ageing I find visiting famous places, seeing famous pictures in art galleries and so on, rather a chore (sometimes a bore). And, these days with the hordes of tourists abroad, I often find that I am in a queue or crowd that is so slow moving that I want to sit down and rest a while, and often, in such a crowd, not able to see that which I had come to see. In Amsterdam I found the Van Goch art gallery so full with people who lingered a long time on each painting, listening to the info over a commentary on cassette borrowed at the front desk, that I could not move along at the pace I wished to go and, therefore, missed a lot of the exhibition by going round groups.
My grandfather used to say "O I don't want to travel anymore, I can read about the places I would like to visit and look at pictures of them." That was fifty or so years ago. I can only imagine what his reaction would be now with all the technical facilities we have at our dispoal: TV travelogues; David Attenborough's nature documentaries; the internet; films......
I used to dream of a holiday I would have liked to take: a Rolls Royce to the South of France, staying at top class hotels of course throughout; a stop at Menton for their small scale music festival (a swim in the clear sea - it was clear once when I was there, don't know if it is now); drive up to Lucerne for the music festival there (I once went up to the box office there and asked for a ticket for that evening's concert - the girl at the box office dropped her jaw and shook her head slowly as if I were a lunatic or a leper); from Lucerne to London, via Paris (to dine of course) for The Proms; from there to Edinburgh for the Festival and then back home.
Dreams, dreams, dreams.

Film Music

Sometimes the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, made up of professionals and amateurs I believe, perform a concert of music from films. I have been to a few of these concerts but I find them, usually, unsatisfying. Some of the pieces have been made by composers or arrangers into quite good works in themselves: they have the structures of tone poems in that they unify around a theme. But often the music is slight.
Music for films early on was used to act as a dramatic accompaniment to action so that in a mystery you would expect sounds which enhanced the mystery; for comic scenes you would probably have "comic like music", light of touch, breezy. And so on.
A good deal of this music was simply sounds that of course were musical but which underlined the main action going on; the action and dialogue were there to be seen and heard, not the background music.
One of the worst examples I have seen and heard was in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" in which the composer (Dimitri Tiomkin maybe?) underlines practically every piece of action with what he thought was suitable musical sound. I don't think the score of that film would make an enjoyable work to be played on its own.
But some can: John Williams's can; so can Elmer Bernstein's; so can, of course, Arthur Bliss's as for "Things to Come".
Two examples of music used most successfully in films are two in which already well-known compositions by famous composers were appropriated: "Death in Venice" with Mahler's 5th. and "Brief Encounter" with Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto.
I think film music is most successful when you are not aware of it or, when you are, when it adds excitement to the drama: "The Magnificent Seven"; "Shane"; "The Horse Soldiers"; "City Lights".

Jackdaws

I am reading a short story by William Trevor called "Traditions"; in it he describes how a group of schoolboys have been keeping jackdaws but somone has killed them all. It called to mind a farmer who lived a mile or so from us when I was a child who had a pet jackdaw.
In the story by Trevor the boys had tried to make the birds talk; so, according to his son, did the farmer. I'm not sure if he was successful because you always took everything his son said with a pinch of salt: the jackdaw was real alright, but whether it could talk no one knew - it never talked to other people perhaps, only to "close family", so to speak!
Dickens creates a wonderful bird, not a jackdaw but a close relative of his, a raven in his novel "Barnaby Rudge".

"Look at him!" said Varden, divided between admiration of the bird and a kind of fear of him. "Was there ever such a knowing imp as that! O he's a dreadful fellow."
The raven with his head very much on one side and his bright eye shining like a diamond, preserved a thoughtful silence for a while....
"Halloa, halloa, halloa!" the bird said. "What's the matter here? Keep up your spirits. Never say die. Bow, wow, wow. I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil. Hurrah" - and then, as if exulting in his infernal character, he began to whistle.
"I more than half believe he speaks the truth. Upon my word I do," said Varden.

One day someone asked about the farmer's jackdaw - he hadn't been seen for some time.
"He died," the farmer's son told us boys sadly. "We'd clipped his wings to stop him flying away but he fell in a barrel of water, couldn't fly out and drowned."
We all looked sad.
"Dad's very upset," he added. "Drowning his sorrows."
I'll bet he was. He had a good excuse for once!

Gwyn Jones

The name Gwyn Jones came up today when having a coffee with a friend who had recently been present at the dedication of a plaque at Aberystwyth University to the man who was a professor there.
Gwyn Jones came from my home town of Blackwood; he was near contemporary of my father and they knew each other. Occasionally they would meet in the main street in Blackwood and chat - they were acquaintances rather than friends.
Their lives had followed different paths though they began similarly.
Gwyn Jones had gone to secondary school followed by university followed by a teaching post, followed by a professorship at Aberystwyth. He wrote novels and short stories though he is best known for his translation of the Mabinogion and his writings on Icelandic sagas. He was born in 1907.
My father was born in 1895, went to primary school but did not attend secondary school because his father had died suddenly and so he had to become the bread winner. He was working in the coal mine from about twelve onwards, rose to an office job on the surface, from there to a Labour Exchange and from there to work in the Coal Board where he eventually succeeded to a post as Labour Relations Officer in Cardiff.
He too wrote novels none of which were published; he wrote short stories too as did Gwyn Jones and some of them were published and broadcast.
Gwyn Jones wrote in a beautiful style which, I always felt, had a trace of the academic about it. My father wrote in a more flamboyant style which had nothing of academia about it at all.
I wonder what would have happened if my father had gone into Secondary education instead of working down the mine; he should have and could have if his mother had taken up an offer from an uncle of his to pay the fees necessary for such an education. But how could she? There was little if any provision then for widows with children as far as I know. So down the pit he went. And here I am. It wouldn't be me writing this if he had gone the other way.
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both....." (Frost)

10 Best Films

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker has given a list of what he thinks are the best 10 films of 2008. I wish I had seen some of them; most are foreign films and they are not distributed except to art houses (like Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff). Only three on his list were American: "The Quantum of Solace" which most reviewers treated with scant regard as to its quality, "Iron Man" which again did not receive very favourable reviews, and "Changeling", the only one on his list that I have seen, directed by Clint Eastwood and which has been favourably reviewed by practically every newspapers' critics. "Wall E" I know nothing about.
My favourite film of the year was "Gone, Baby, Gone" which I think has one of the finest ends ever (almost vying with Chaplin's "City Lights" for an intensity of sentiment and irony) and contains one of the best performances I've seen for years: the mother of the missing child. For that she should get a supporting actress Oscar.
Anthony Lane's book "Nobody's Perfect" (the last comment in "Some Like it Hot") is a wonderful collection of his reviews and essays. One remark has stuck in my head, one he made about Rees Witherspoon: "she's the girl next door who can't wait to get out of town".

Moaning Minnies

I once tried to collaborate with a woman in the writing of a play; she had been a quite well known actress and had, with her more famous husband, written plays which had been performed. The idea was that I would write a scene and then she would read it, comment on it and perhaps, do some re-writing.
It didn't work. I wrote the first scene and when she read it she said: "I like the idea and I like the male characters, especially the parliamentarian's agent, but I do not like the wife of the MP. She is a real misery."
"But she is supposed to be," I said. "She's miserable because he's such a bastard."
"You won't get an actress to play her."
"Why not?"
"Because she's a misery, a moaner, a pain in the neck."
I tried re-writing to make her a different sort of woman but couldn't get her right, so the collaboration didn't work and we gave up trying.
Then this morning my wife was listening to The Archers and I could hear from the other room one of those women in the programme moaning and grissling and making such a caterwauling noise that I had to go elsewhere. I thought: "They get away with it in The Archers, why couldn't I have got away with it in my play?"
And if by chance I turn on East Enders every woman on that soap is a Moaning Minnie. (And most of the blokes too!). And what about some of Shakespeare's tragic females: Lady Macbeth for example - that's all she dies is complain and criticise and moan. And what about Hedda Gabler?
Maybe I'll dig that play out again and, instead of trying to make the wife more pleasing, leave her as she was..... You never know, it may just work.

Shock Treatment

In the new Clint Eastwood film, "Changeling", there is a scene of real horror when a friend of the main character, played by Angelina Jolie, is forced to undergo electric shock treatment in an asylum in twenties America. Clint, of course, knows how to raise the temperature when directing violent sequences (I find it hard to watch some of his late westerns) and succeeds here in making you feel almost that you are experiencing it yourself.
I once wrote a letter to The Guardian expressing my horror at something the paper had reported: the enforced electric shock treatment given to a Catholic priest. The letter was published and elicited a series of letters to me: most thought that I myself must have suffered the same thing - not so; or that a member of my family had suffered thus - not so; or that I or a close relation had suffered or was suffering mental probelms and that we feared such treatment may be practiced on us - not so. One person thought I must be a Catholic and that my sympathy for the priest was a consequence of my own belief. I'm not a Catholic so not so.
Thank Heavens such barbaric treatment for mental illness is no longer used.
I once knew someone who had received such treatment when he had had a breakdown; he never talked about it ( a friend of his told me). Later when he got back to normal, so to speak, he became a successful writer of detective stories with about 50 novels published.
You must not draw any conclusions from those two happenings: that the second was due to the first.
Again, not so.

Jazz

Alan Ross in his book "The Rest is Noise" writes about black composers in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Some were well taught and trained and became wonderful players of various intruments, but they never could get recognition and often, like Will Marion Cook (whom Dvorak thought would become a great composer), never made the grade in classical music and resorted to forming bands.
Cook formed a band called The New York Syncopated Orchestra and asked Sydney Bechet to join it - which he did.
I may have come close to Sydney Bechet a long time ago. On a holiday in Paris some time back we, three students, joined a club called The St Germain de Pres night club. We spent a lot of money there and heard a lot of good jazz and saw some rather risque shows....
Anyway, a few weeks after coming home I went to a barber's shop in Cardiff and the usual bloke cutting my hair asked me if I'd been anywhere nice on holiday. I told him I'd been to Paris and while there had joined the St Germain club.
He stopped cutting hair; he came round to look at me.
"Sydney Bechet plays there," he said.
"Really?"
He continued cutting my hair but I could see he was moved or impressed or envious.
I knew (I had seen him a few times) that in his spare time he played in a local swing and jazz band that performed at various dance halls in the city.
Like Bechet he played the clarinet.

Singing and Whistling

Jimmy Durante liked to "start the day with a song". The trouble is that if I do (in my head rather than vocally, under the shower) it stays with me for the rest of the day.
I remember going to a symphony concert in Cardiff when I was a student and hearing Sibelius's 2nd Symphony; the next day I heard various versions of the famous tune of the last movement in the corridors of the college: those who attended the same concert were heard to be either humming or whistling it pretty well all day.
Once that tune gets into my head it stays there for hours if not a day if not days.
Again, the final movement of Sibelius's 5th Symphony - though it's difficult to hum, sing or whistle the final bashing notes; all you can do is think them.
Thinking tunes is an odd practice though it must have been what Beethoven did when he went deaf. At the first performance of his 9th. Symphony, which he conducted when he was completely deaf, he could not hear the applause at the end and a member of the orchestra turned him about to face the audience. He could "hear" his own music but he couldn't hear the applause.
I tend to whistle rather than sing chiefly, I suppose, because I feel that my singing would be too unpleasant to others.
Georg Bernard Shaw did not sing in the morning (to my knowledge) but it is a recorded fact that before he retired for the night he sang long and loud, not just one song that had stuck in his mind but heaps of them: arias from Mozart particularly. I wonder if his wife welcomed it or put in her ear plugs.
If his singing compared with his acting abilities it wasn't up to much. Sybil Thorndike used to tell of Shaw's occasional visits to rehearsals of his plays and how he used to show them how it should be done - "he was hopeless" she maintaned.
What I've got in my head at the moment is "Many a teardrop will fall/ But it's all/ In the game...." (Nat King Cole is singing it).

Artists

I was surprised to hear what the composer Harrison Birtwistle's choice of music was on Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago: he did not choose any composers from the past, not even from the past of twenty or so years ago. He chose music from the present, like, of course, his own.
But listening and watching a programme tonight on BBC 4, Andrew Dixon told of Vasari and the artists of The Renaissance who chose to ignore their predecessors and go back for their inspiration to Greek and Roman artists; so this may be what all creative artists tend to do - rubbish those from whom they have learnt most.
The composers of the 20th Century in England like Vaughan Williams went back for inspiration to folk song; the American composers of the 20th Century took their inspiration from Jazz. So did the French composers like Poulenc and Russians like Stravinski - though Jazz seemed to be an inspiration in their case for only a short period of time, about five years.
For an artist to progress, it seems, means he must reject those artists who have come before him; not only reject their influence on him but actually demonstrate their revulsion of them.
I am thinking of the Impressionists, of Picasso, of John Osborne and his Angry Young Men who denounced such playwrights as Terence Rattigan.
The trouble is that in this dismissal of that which was once fashionable the public go along with the trend and they too dismiss it. But eventually that which was dismissed sometimes becomes suddenly acceptable: you get a sort of renaissance of the plays of Rattigan and the works that came before the Impressionists and of the music that came before Schoenberg.
Schoenberg, incidentally, believed that anything that was popular could not be art and anything that was art could not be popular. He will turn in his grave if his music becomes popular but I can't forsee much chance of that happening - so rest in peace Arnold Schoenberg.

Sybil Thorndike

A review of a new book on the life of Sybil Thorndike says that "she was a pioneer, even when an established star, never happier during the second world war than when touring Welsh mining villages in 'Medea' and 'Macbeth'."
I can testify to the fact that she toured Welsh mining villages, having been present at a performance in Blackwood, Monmouthshire, of "Macbeth". I can't remember much about it being very young but I do remember the excitement it
caused. It seemed that everyone was speaking of the event before the performance and, of course, the Institute of Mineworkers Hall (called colloquially "the Stute") was packed to the roof.
I believe that she and her husband, Lewis Casson, brought a limited number of performers with them so Blackwood theatre company provided most of the extras required.
The Blackwood Theatre group was a well known amateur group in South Wales. When I was young I saw them do Shaw's "Saint Joan" and some of the famous Greek tragedies; and when, later, I went to Blackwood in my capacity of theatre critic for the much despised South Wales Spectator (one of those journals that focussed most pages on society weddings), I reviewed a good performance of "The Father" by Strinberg. So you can see that this theatre company was no ordinary amateur group only producing standard farces and popular West End plays - they often did the big stuff.
Sybil Thorndike had a tremendous reputation as an actress early in her career doing the first "Saint Joan" for example but, as with all actors of that time, they tended to be left behind when "Look Back in Anger" and so on came along.
The review in The Spectator mentions her in "that legendary Uncle Vanya" as "an unforgettable nurse rooted in the earth like a Courbet-figure". I saw it and remember Olivia's great performance and Redgrave's wonderful Vanya himself but, alas, I do not recall her in it. Olivia always made everyone seem small beside him - even the rhiniceros in a play by Ionesco.

Drunks

Some writers can't write unless they are drunk. Dylan Thomas for example, though he maintained that he didn't drink much while writing, only after finishing a poem.
Dickens liked a lot to drink according to Paul Johnson in an article in The Spectator, and there certainly is a lot of drinking going on in his novels. Johnson quotes Dickens in a letter to his daughter:
"At seven in the morning in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoons of rum. At 12 a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten with a glass of sherry..... At quarter past ten, soup, anything to drink I fancy."
I read his novel "Pickwick Papers" a few years ago and was struck by the amount of drinking that went on by Pickwick himself and his Pickwickians. There are whole passages where Pickwick is either dining and drinking immense amounts of liquor or falling down in a heap, drunk.
We were in Muswell Hill a year or so ago and went to have lunch in a pub called "The Spaniards". Much to my surprise there were notes on the menus to the effect that this pub was mentioned in "The Pickwick Papers"; this I already knew - what I didn't know was that the pub was a real one, not an invention of Dickens's.
In one of the scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" attention is drawn to the behaviour of boys from Westminster School, to the effect that the waiters were almost as badly behaved as those boys. I wondered if the present headmaster was aware of this reference in the novel so wrote a short note to apprise him of it. He sent me a postcard with the words: "Thank you for your letter. Yes, no doubt nothing changes."

Dennis Noble

The second record I bought, a 78, many years ago featured the English baritone Dennis Noble. His name came to mind this week when an article in The Times mentioned Belshazzar's Feast. It was mentioned because the biblical story seemed to higlight features of the credit crunch - rather a way-out reference I thought.
The Belshazzar's Feast I know better is William Walton's oratorio. I once went to a concert in London in which the oratorio was performed with, if my memory serves me right, William Walton himself conducting the work with the soloist Dennis Noble.
He was a wonderful baritone with a rather hard timbre to his voice.
The record I had purchased all those years ago had on the one side the Prologue to Pagliacci and, on the other, the famous Barber song from "The Barber of Sevile" by Rossini.
What I remember most about the record was that Dennis Noble sang both songs in English. I don't think I have heard either in English since.
When I wrote a monthly article for a journal called "The South Wales Spectator" for which I received the princely sum of £5 per article, I used to rant on about operas being always performed in foreign languages. How was anyone to know what they were singing about for Heaven's sake? I remember, in one article, suggesting sub-titles. Now they have sur-titles. I often wonder if I was the first to come up with the idea; probably not because the readership of "The South Wales Spectator" was very small indeed.
"Belshazzar's Feast" is a wonderful work, one of Walton's best, but it was thought that it would not be popular when it was first performed (at Leeds). Thomas Beecham suggested to Walton that since he was "up North" he should throw in a brass band to make it more thrilling. Might as well make the best of it, he said, because "it wouldn't be performed again."
It's still going strong.

Films from Novels

I once met a novelist named Frederick E. West. Not well known now though at one time he was a bit famous for writing the novel "633 Squadron". It was made into a film which he thought rather good - buit he never got a cent for it. I can't recall how that was - maybe it had to do with his selling it outright for ready cash or to do with American royalties not covered in an agreement.... Doesn't matter why: he was still bitter about it years later.
So was Jack Trevor Story, novelist, who often wrote in a column in a newspaper about how he had never made a penny from the film version of his most well-known novel "The Trouble with Harry".
Today there's an obituary in The Times of John Michael Hayes, a script writer for films in the 50's and 60's then later a writer for TV series. Two of his most famous film scripts were for "The Trouble with Harry" and "Rear Window". Both were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the obit. there was no mention of the novel from which the script was taken; you get the idea that Hitchcock had proposed the idea and Hayes had gone about writing the script. Jack Trevor Story never forgave Hitchcock.
Strangely enough no mention was made either of the original novel from which the film "Rear Window" had been taken. It was a novel in fact written by an American writer of rather horrific fiction named Cornell Woolrich.
I have a copy of "633 Squadron" signed by the author. Worth anything I wonder?

Dubai

Was I dreaming or did I read somewhere that a wedding that took place in Dubai recently cost as much as 13 million dollars? OK, so people are rich out there but squandering that amount of money on a wedding strikes me as.... well, demented.
I have a slim association with Dubai in that a play of mine was performed there last year. Not, I hasten to add, anywhere near The Atlantis hotel where the wedding took place (with, by the way, a firework display that out-brillianced the one in China at the Olympic Games) but at a school.
My play "Dreamjobs" which over the years has been put on many times, is now not all that popular; so I was surprised to see from the info. on my royalty payment that it had been staged at The American School of Dubai.
Look that school up on the internet and you'll see it's one of the most fabulous schools - they do everything a school should do there, and more.
I wrote an e mail to the Drama Teacher at the school asking how my play went down but did not receive a reply. I was hoping for the sort of reply that said something like "It went down wonderfully well and we'd like to extend an invitation for you to come to our school as Resident Playwright for a year or two, where we'll put you up in The Atlantis, all expenses paid....."
What I did get was a cheque for £16.

Critics

I see that Clive Barnes the influential critic has died. He and Frank Rich were both New York critics and they were influential in the way that they could, with a bad review, close a Broadway show practically overnight. One show that one of them was influential in closing was "Under Milk Wood", a production that here in Britain had had a good run but there in New York ran for about a month. It had Glyn Houston as the narrator and I believe he was most distressed by its reception in the States.
Clive Barnes, shortly after he became New York Times drama and dance critic had a telegram from David Merrick, a top Broadway producer saying "The honeymoon's over." Barnes replied "Didn't know we were married. Didn't know you were that kind of boy."
I was never actually threatened as Clive Barnes once was by Joe Papp but I was banned once from reviewing at a well known Cardiff theatre, and I received some quite angry phone calls from some disappointed performers. Then there was the letter I received from someone who didn't like the things I was writing: the letter was a picture of a plate of sausage and mash and across it were written the words "get stuffed."
You don't realise when you are writing reviews how hurtful they can be; artists love praise but some of them can't take criticism. There's a film with Vincent Price in which he plays a crazy ex-actor who takes his brutal revenge on all those theatre critics who reviewed him badly by getting rid of them one by one. I sat through it with mixed feelings wondering if, sometimes, I had gone too far.

Discipline

A friend of mine from college days did his National Service in the Royal Air Force. He had a degree in Chemistry and Mathematics and there in the air force he became a sergeant in the Education Section.
His first task was to lecture to a class of young men all of whom were Officer Cadets. They being of the officer group (or soon to be) were considered a notch (i.e. class) above what he was - Non-Commissioned Officer.
He started to deliver his lecture when some tittering broke out, then some whispered remarks, then some laughter. He didn't know exactly what it had to do with but guessed it might have had something to do with his Welsh accent.
Somehow he got through the lecture but he immediately went to see the head of the unit (brigade or whatever they call it in the RAF), a Wing Commander possibly - someone fairly high up the officer ranks.
He told the officer what had happened and said he would not be able to carry on with his lecturing under these circumstances.
The officer said; "Go to the next lecture and carry on as if nothing had happened."
"But sir...."
"Leave it to me," said the senior officer.
"Yes sir."
The next lecture time arrived and my friend went into the room and stood there about to start. There was the usual tittering, whispering etc.
Then the door opened and in came the senior officer he had spoken to.
He stood there at the back of the room and told my friend to continue please.
Silence.
The man remained standing there until the end of the lecture. He said not a word to the officer cadets who were silent throughout, listening attentively and taking notes.
At the end he walked out.
My friend told me he never had any trouble with that class again.

Shirley Bassey

Mark Stein, who writes a piece about a popular song every week on his website, chose this week to write about what he thought was the best Bond song. He chose "Goldfinger" sung by Shirley Bassey. I knew the music was by John Barry but didn't know that the lyrics were by Anthony Newley and Leonard Bricusse. Bricusse and Newley had, of course, collaborated on "Stop the World I want to get Off" which ran in London for a long time.
It's a great number, a good film, probably the best of the Bond films, and it is magnificently belted out by Bassey.
I once tried to get an interview with Shirley Bassey for a newspaper but wasn't successful. The nearest I got to her in the respect of knowing someone who knew someone who knew her was that I was aquainted with a man who came to the same local as I used to go to: Eric - don't know his other name. Eric used to be a singer with Shirley Bassey in a club in Cardiff. She wasn't there long; she soon found fame in London and went on from there to hit it big. Eric stayed put.
I did write a review of a show she did in Cardiff when she was....O, in her forties or early dfifties and I remember mentioning that it was difficult for what were then called "coloured" people from Cardiff Docks area to make it in any art or sport. But there were two others, I remember writing, who did: Billie Boston and Joe Erskine.
I don't thing Boston would at that time have been able to play rugby for Cardiff - there was no colour bar as such but there was just the same. Billie Boston went North to play rugby league and was a tremendous success on the wing. Joe Erskine of course had some famous fights with the top boxers of the day.
Mark Stein says you can't pick a top Bond song that is not composed by John Barry and seemed on another occasion to suggest that you can't have a Bond title song without Shirley Bassey. I know what he means, good as some of the others are.

Sunset

When I was a very little boy I attended a school which was divided into two sections - one for boys, the other for girls. We hardly ever mixed. We hardly ever saw any of the girls or their teachers. Occasionally their headmistress would pay a visit and even now I recall how, as soon as she had left, the eye rolling of male teachers would start and the slightly scornful grins of disrespect.
She was not so much fierce but overwhelming. She was large of stature and loud of voice. She was, I thought, what was called "a dragon" of a woman.
We were all afraid of her; I think possibly the men on the teaching staff were too.
But I recall something she'd do that makes me warm to her in retrospect - though at the time I thought it daft.
If there was a beautiful sunset just before the end of a school day, she would march all the girls in her section of the school, out to see the sunset. They would stand there and look at it for quite a long time. I don't know what she told them, couldn't hear, if she said anything at all. Maybe she thought that they'd get some religious-like feeling from watching the sun go slowly down.
So recently when I have been reading article after article, review upon review, about the Rothko exhibition at The Tate in London, reading how, being in a room full of his paintings, people seem to get a religious kind of experience from it - then I think of the headmistress and the sunsets.
Rothko painted those seemingly meaningless abstracts of long lengths of colour on top of each other..... like the sunset when there are those great stretches of red and grey and white filling the sky. Which, of course, are as seemingly meaningless as Rothko's.
Thank you Miss.... Sorry I've forgotten your name.

Prizes

George Osborne's having to give Peter Mandelson a Spectator prize a couple of days ago reminded me of when a man I knew, Dai G., was obliged to present a prize to a certain Gwyn C. who I also knew. Osborne and Mandelson had, of course, been good friends until the incident arising from their fraternisation on a Russian oligarch's yacht; after the incident they must have felt themselves to be enemies for life, yet here they were, in a newspaper picture, seeming to enjoy each others' company as Mandelson accepted his prize (for politician of the year or some such thing).
Dai G. and Gwyn C. had been very close friends for some years. Both were playwrights, successful in their own ways, Dai G. on radio, Gwyn C. in publishing plays for the amateur market.
Then something happened between them (I never discovered what) and they became bitter enemies. They never spoke to each other although they were often in the same company, for example at fairly regular meetings of The Welsh Guild of Playwrights.
Every year the Drama Association of Wales ran a play competition for one act plays. One year Dai G. was the adjudicator and Gwyn C. knew that if he entered the competition and Dai got to know it was he, then there was no way he would win. So he entered a play written in a style Dai G. would not recognise as Gwyn's. "Then," he told me, "I borrowed a typewriter so that Dai G. wouldn't recognise the type as mine."
The competition was done using pseudonyms so there was no way Dai G. could know who had entered.
Well, Gwyn won.
Dai G. told me: "I told the secretary of the Drama Association the winner, she wrote the pseudonym down and looked up the winner's name." She told him it was Gwyn C. "Can I change my mind about the winner?" he asked. She shook her head and said "Certainly not."
So there was Dai G. (like George Osborne)having to make a short speech congratulating Gwyn C. on being the year's winner and there was Gwyn C. (like Peter Mandelson) accepting the £50 prize money with very great joy.
They never spoke to each other again.

Fish

"The sting-ray was about six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, and perhaps ten feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail. It was dark grey with that violet tinge that is so often a danger signal in the underwater world. When it rose from the pale golden sand and swam a little distance it was as if a black towel was being waved through the water."
Hemingway perhaps?
The next line defines it:
"James Bond, his hands along his flanks, and swimming with only a soft trudge of his fins followed the black shadow....."
I had never been fond of Bond novels (except "Goldfinger" which I thought exciting); then I read this short story, "The Hildebrand Rarity" and I was impressed. It's about diving with a harpoon gun.... (can't remember much about it except how stylish it was).
A friend of mine hired such a gun when he was abroad on holiday but he got to be quite unhappy about using it. He told me "you get close to a fish, it doesn't move but looks at you sort of politely, enquiringly; then you shoot it and you feel sorry you did."
He gave it up. But not before he'd killed a rather large squid (one of those squids that get larger every time the story is told). He dragged it onto the beach but didn't know what to do with it until he was approached by a couple of blokes, fishermen types, who offered him a good payment for it if he didn't want it. Well, he didn't know how to cook squid so he sold it. Then he took the gun back to the place he'd hired it from and never shot another fish - or a squid - again.
I know what he meant by the inquisitive, innocent, trusting look of fish in South of France waters. I never used a gun or anything else of a lethal nature but just swam about with them. Until, one day, something stung me: a jelly fish.
Not a pleasant thing to happen. If I'd had a harpoon gun then I'd have...... Well, maybe.

Gin

A letter from a 79 year old man in The Times today describes how he took the advice of his dentist many years ago to "increase substantially the ratio of gin to tonic" in his favourite drink because the tonic with its sugar content was ruining his teeth; he said he still has a good set of teeth.
The medicinal use of gin was always recommended by a certain doctor I vaguely knew: he would tell young mothers with crying babies to pour a glass of gin, rub some of the gin on the baby's gums and then "drink the rest".
One day this same doctor drove to Cambridge from Cardiff to visit his son, his daughter-in-law and their young baby boy of about two years of age. When he got there he was worn out and asked his son for a drink. The son dutifully poured his father his usual tipple - a large (very large) gin with a little drop of water. The doctor took a sip and put it on a side table nearby.
His son said they'd been having terrible trouble with the baby because he wouldn't sleep well, crying at night - it was wearing them both down.
When the doctor came to pick up his gin, the glass was empty and there, standing nearby was the baby boy.
The doctor said nothing and after a while they all went to bed.
The following morning the doctor's son came downstairs beaming with joy: "That's the best night's sleep we've had for ages," he said.
The boy had slept soundly all night.
The doctor never told them why.

Ian Fleming

I have never been a fan of James bond novels or films, though the first film to have Daniel Craig as Bond was rather good. He is believeable as a human being; the others were not. Yet, while I'm reading the latest Bond book, a collection of short stories with the title "Quondam of Solace" (same title as the new film), I keep imagining Bond not as Daniel Craig but as Roger Moore, someone I didn't like at all in his Bond films.
I don't know how they were able to produce a whole film from the story with the title "Quondam of Solace" because it hardly has Bond in it - he spends the whole short story listening to someone tell him about a certain man who married an air hostess and how the marriage broke up.... and so on. Bond in not involved in any physical action, he just sits and listens.
I shall see what they have done with the story when I see the film soon.
Raymond Chandler was a fan of Ian Fleming. I was, at first, surprised to hear this since Chandler is such a fine writer and Ian Fleming, I always thought, was an inferior writer of pulp fiction.
I was wrong. Fleming is a very good writer indeed. He has a way with phrases that make them almost poetic in the sense that you feel he has hit the spot with ease and style. There is, of course, a nasty brutal aspect to Bond that is not in the character of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe and this comes out occasionaly so strongly that you wonder why you find the man so fascinating. But Fleming tells a very good short story, a thing he may be better at than novel writing, like Maupassant.

Upside down?

Some years back we went to see the Jackson Pollock exhibition at The Tate in London. The most impressive aspect of it to me was the way it was set up and the way it was described (commentary through ear-pieces). It was presented with his early work first, then you moved around the rooms listening to the explanations and history until you came, gradually, to the final works, the ones he is most famous for - the drip and throw stuff.
The commentary pointed out the devopment of the style at the same time as the personality of the painter seemed to change - from quite normal to, really, a psychiatric case at the end. The paintings sort of illustrated his decline towards madness.
We bought a reproduction for a few pounds and took it home to hang it on the wall where we have some other reproductions of famous paintings. But we didn't know which way up it was to go. I can't remember how we decided but eventually we put it long way up.
One of these days I shall find out if this was right.
In the meantime I discover, from an article in The Telegraph today, that there is some dispute going on in "artistic circles" as to whether some of the Rothko's at The Tate now on show have been hung correctly.
No one seems to know.
Both these painters, it seems to me, are more interesting in the study of their personalities than in the depth of their presentation of their ideas. Ideas they certainly do have but I wonder if these ideas, which are so deep, if not perhaps the products of psychotic minds, that their pictorial representation cannot be achieved satisfactorilly.
I hope to go to the Rothko some time. I am told it is like having a religious experience. Well, good - I haven't had one of those for years.

The War

I knew Bill for about twenty years but only twice did he mention the Second World War. He was a young lieutenant then, in Europe after the invasion.
He said his troup was marching through a town which had been liberated by the Americans when a crowd came out to greet them. "They kept cheering and shouting 'It's the British, the British are coming'." Apparently they had had enough of the Yanks and were so pleased to see the British that, Bill said, it was embarrassing.
When they arrived at their headquarters, still occupied by some Americans, he and a Major opened a door of a room to discover a young American soldier in bed with two women, one each side of him. "Hi, Guys," he said cheerily.
His other story had to do with a Major or Colonel who was giving Bill and another young lietenant their orders. "See that hill over there? Well, you have to take your platoons onto the that hill and stay there until...."
"Hold it there Sir," said Bill's companion. "No need to say any more, Sir - I've read the book."
And they all laughed.
Don't say there's no such thing as dry, British humour which can reveal itself in the most desperate of circumstances.
The phrase "The British are coming," reminds me of an American composer of popular songs who one day was boasting to fellow practitioners of the art that he could write a love song if he were given any phrase you liked. So one of the group said: "OK, how about 'The Russians are coming?' " The composer thought for a while, then his eyes lit up and he said "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, so let's make love tonight."

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Years ago when there were many cinemas in South Wales, a lot owned by people not by organisations like Odeon, they used to have showings of new films for these owners, called Trade Shows. Sometimes I'd be lucky enough to get tickets for these films. I can't recall how I did this but it usually had to do with knowing someone who knew someone who knew the owner or manager of one of the valley cinemas - or, as we often did, by standing outside the cinema when a Trade Show was about to start and asking if we could go in with a person who was about himself to go in - a ticket could be used for two people. That is begging, in a way. Usually these trade people would say yes so you could see one of the latest releases before it was distributed to the general public - for free!
There are only two films I recall seeing at a Trade Show: a film with Jerry Lewis which was dreadful, and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" which was marvellous.
I went with my brother, older than me by four years. How we got tickets I don't know though I do know it wouldn't have been by begging (he wouldn't have done that sort of thing).
This afternoon I caught on TV the ending of "Fort Bravo" which was the prequel to "Yellow Ribbon", the first in the series John Ford made concerning the career of a certain officer in the American army played by John Wayne. What a wonderful film it is: great performances by Henry Fonda and Wayne, with Victor McClaglen bursting the seams of his uniform with cheery Oirish vitality.
This film is in black and white, "Yellow Ribbon" is in glorious technicolour.
As we came out of the dark cinema into the bright morning sun my brother stopped, turned to me and said: "What a marvellous film that was."
So it was. Is.
Apart from when we were boys I think that is the only film I ever saw with him in a cinema. We didn't always like the same things (though I do recall that we both loved the violin concertos of Sibelius and Elgar and the black and white versions of the Shakespeare history plays on TV) but on this occasion we found something we both liked enormously.

In Court

When I was a student a friend of mine was arrested and his case came up a few weeks later. "Rusty" (he had red hair!), with some friends of his, had broken into the Students' Union building - I can't recall why - but probably looking for a few more drinks. Someone heard them and phoned the police. When the police approached the group Rusty pulled out from his pocket a water pistol and shot water into the policeman's face.
We (Rusty's other friends, the unnarrested ones) all turned up to his trial and, lo and behold, he got off with a caution.
The case didn't last long so we stayed on to see the next case which was a bloke who had been caught breaking into a shop. The policeman who had arrested him stood facing the crook's lawyer who said: "Officer, you say that, in arresting my client, you used your truncheon." "Yes, I did." "Tell me, constable, have you used a truncheon before?" "Never," said the copper proudly.
"I see," said the defence council, "untrained in the use of a truncheon."
I wondered: do they give such training? If so, on dummies? Or volunteers? They should have used Rusty - that head of red hair would have taken all the blows like a sponge.

Little Dorrit

Am I the only person in the land to think that the BBC production of "Little Dorrit" is pretty awful?
The praise it's receiving from TV pundits is lavish to the extent that I'm beginning to think I'm missing something. OK, the acting is excellent, the settings well presented, the story unfolds in an almost acceptably dramatic way but it's all so slow and tedious and un-literary. It is Dickens in the sense that it has his eccentric characters on display but the trouble is here that practically everyone is eccentric. And the names they have!
In the book one tends to accept these characters because they are basically funny; but here they are no fun, they are simply eccentrically daft.
And the story is so contrived and dull. And the two main characters, Little Dorrit and the male lead, Clenham, so plainly formulations of what Dickens believes are "good people".
I think it a disaster and I must put the blame mostly on the shoulders of the adapter, Andrew Davies.
Some of the TV critics have drawn attention to the contemporary significance of the theme: people in dept in the credit crunch. But that doesn't make the story credible - it's simply an excuse for the play's basic lack of credibilty.
"Mad Men", repeated now on BBC4 is a masterpiece in comparision and that has no contemporary significance at all, except that it deals with people under various stresses as they try to make meaning of their lives. Something that's always with us.

Bingo

Someone writing in The Spectator recently mentioned a new kind of bingo game - "wine bingo". A crowd get together at someone's house and do a wine tasting..... I'm afraid I didn't understand the game so it's pointless my trying to explain it; also, it seemed utterly dull and boring and not the sort of game I'd like to take part in (see who could drink the fastest tumbler of wine might be more in my line).
But the word "bingo" brought to mind a wedding reception I went to years ago. An aquaintance of mine, big drinker, had married a nurse, big drinker, and the reception was in a pub. I don't recall there being much food available but there were plenty of drinks and the sort of people invited were all people who could"put it away", as they say.
There were no speeches, just hard drinking.... Then someone got on a loud speaker and announced that the bingo session was about to commence.
"Bingo!" exclaimed my drunken friend, the groom. "We don't want this."
So he started making a fuss, complaining that he had come here to celebrate his wedding not to play ******* bingo.
"What are you going to do?" my wife asked me.
"Play bingo, of course," I said. "Haven't had a game of bingo for years."
So we were all presented with cards and play commenced. Except that the groom wasn't going to let this happpen. He bellowed things at the caller, fell over chairs, squared up to a harmless looking bloke who tried to come to his assistance and was so unpleasant that.... Well, the fact is he was thrown out.
It is the only time in my life that I have seen someone thrown out of their own wedding party.
But no one cared much. We were all heads down looking for the full house. I'm not sure but I do have the singular feeling that his newly aquired wife was there in the crowd, head down.... No, it's just wishful thinking.

It's All in the Game

You don't see many novels on the shelves of bookshops these days by Sinclair Lewis, though, if there is one, it will probably be "Main Street". It was his most famous novel but I found it difficult to read; it was one of those books (like "Women in Love" by D.H.Lawrence) that you put down and think "I won't pick it up again" but you do. It's about a "modern" woman (20's or 30's America) who marries a small town doctor and lives in a place with small town values. She revolts against her dreadfully dull life..... It's not a novel I'll read again - though now I've said something about it I must say I do have a desire to re-try it. His other novels like "Babbitt" or "Kingsblood Royal" or "Cass Timberlaine" or the wonderful "Elmer Gantry" I'm sure I could read again and enjoy them again.
But one of his novels I once tried to read I gave up on. It bored me. It was "The Man who Knew Coolidge". Coolidge was president of the US in the 20's and a duller man there never was - or, at least, that was the impression I got from Sinclair Lewis's novel. Now I have come across his name associated indirectly with a very sweet love song called "It's All in the Game".
The words of this song were written by Carl Sigman in the 50's but he used a tune that had been written in the 20's or earlier by a man named Charles Gates Dawes. This was the only tune Dawes wrote that was published. He didn't try to get it published but a friend did it for him. It was popular then, called simply "Melody in A Sharp" and was a favourite of the famous virtuoso violinist Frtiz Kreisler.
The connection with Coolidge is that Charles Gates Dawes became his Vice President.
They disliked each other intensely; perhaps a bit more than Dawes disliked hearing his own tune played over and over - like Elgar perhaps who didn't much like his Pomp and Circumstance March No.1, especially with those words!
Dawes never lived to hear the tune with words, so he never could enjoy its success - No.1 in the charts in a version by Tommy Edwards (he does it on Youtube), a favourite of Nat King Cole and Dinah Shore; later sung by Cliff Richard.
If Coolidge was a dullard, Dawes certainly wasn't. Not only was he a successful banker and writer of learned tomes on financial matters and Vice P:resident of the United States, he also won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Must get the book again by Sinclair Lewis and see if Charles Gates Dawes is a character in it.

Trevor Jones

When I was young I went to a concert in Blackwood's Miners' Institute; the star of the show was Trevor Jones, tenor. I can find only one reference to his name and that is that he appeared in the film "The Great Mr, Handel" as "tenor". So, I assume he sang in the film but did no acting.
I saw that film, made in 1942, and enjoyed it: it had a lot of Handel's music in it of course and it had a striking performance from Wilfred Lawson as the great composer - a rather argumentative man who spoke with a strong German accent (much different from the part Lawson played in the film "Pygmalion" in which he played the dustman, the heroine's father).
I would very much like to see that film again, see if is any good or see if it merits the one star given it in the film reference website I found it on.
I had seen Trevor Jones's name some ago as one of the singers on an old record of Ivor Novello's songs, I actually had the record but.... where it has gone I don't know.
At the concert in Blackwood I remember Trevor Jones singing only one song, though he must have sung many; it was from an operetta I believe and was the song of a dwarf or deformed man with a "knap-sack"(?) on his back. I doubt if that song will ever be heard again or maybe it will be delivered in a new politically correct, acceptable form - man of smallish build with an attractive protruberance attached naturally to his rear, high up.
He was a fine tenor but now, it seems, forgotten.

Comedians

A few people have recently shown an interest in a one-man play of mine called "I'm on a Train", a play about a man using a mobile phone and how he.... but it'll take too long to tell - send to see the play instead - FREE by e mail.
When I wrote it, a couple of years ago, I thought it would be an ideal piece for Seinfeld. Then, pondering on it a bit more, I thought "No, not Seinfeld but George!" Though the man who plays George is an actor, he is also a comic. Sometimes you can be one and not the other: a comedian can act of course but usually he plays the comic character he has developed over the years; and an actor, good as he may be at entering into the personality of a character, may not be able to be a comedian - he may not get a laugh.
And this might apply to my play "I'm on a Train" more than to many others. I think the play needs a comedian to have success with it because if he doesn't get a laugh pretty well straight off he could, as they say in theatre-land "die a death".
An actor with a Welsh theatre comapny a long time ago said to me one day (or, rather, one evening in the bar) "You know? You've never given me a good review." I can't remember how I flannelled my way out of that accusation but it was true. Not that I'd ever given him a bad one. Probably he felt that he was, sort of, invisible to me.
This same actor in a sort of college show, did a stand-up comedian act and failed dismally though he did elicit from the studentish audience the sort of hollow laughter that might have been polite but was probably a result of them wanting to have a good time and, damn it all, "we're going to laugh even if it isn't very funny."
In a review afterwards I think I wrote something about comedians having to grow over the years, having to bear the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" in such places as Glasgow where, as one comedian put it "they didn't leave a turn un-stoned." You can, of course, stand up and imitate a comedian but I think you'll be lucky if anyone laughs.
Now, today, I've had an e mail from someone who'd like to read the play "I'm on a Train" and I wonder if I should tell him that if he's not a comedian or if he has never known what it is to die on stage then probably he'd be better off not doing it.
But I think I'll let him make his own mind up about it.
Incidentally, the actor I mentioned who'd never received a good review from me went on to greater things; the next time I met him he said he'd just landed a part in a TV production of Emlyn Williams's "The Corn is Green" - the part of the young man who is on his way to Oxford, the one who is tutored by the local teacher. "Well done," I said. "And who's playing the part of the teacher?"
"Katherine Hepburn," he said.

Bristol Old Vic

My daughter said that if typed my full name, John Graham Jones, on Google search, I would find my website first on the list. Which must make me famous.
But it doesn't. First on the list or not, I don't get many "hits" per week. I don't want to be famous anyway - rich yes, famous no. Unless, of course, if famous meant becoming rich.
Anyway, just below my name was another Graham Jones only this was a hyphenated one: Sebastian Graham-Jones. It was his obituary as printed in The Independent.
I didn't know him but remember seing him in quite a lot of productions many years ago at The Theatre Royal where the Bristol Old Vic used to perform.
The obituary didn't mention that he spent some time there as an actor; it drew more attention to his directing skills.
Last year The Bristol Old Vic died too. But it has resurrected itself and re-opens in November this year.
Glad to hear it. I believe they have refurbished the beautiful old Theatre Royal at which many of our now famous actors began their careers.

The Farmer's Wife

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who deals in old books said he had bought at an auction a batch of books by Eden Phillpotts. "Do you know his work?" he asked.
I told him that my father had read him and, I think, liked what he'd read. I said I had never read a novel by him but had once picked one up in a library, read a few pages, put it back - it was a very thick book with small print and heaps of pages - but I had heard a radio play by him once when I was a kid. It had frightened the living daylights out of me. There was a murderer of children at large and - I remember the final scene well - he was making his way across a field to the farm house of two children with knife in his hand, when the knife's blade glittered in the moon's rays and attracted the attention of the farmer's bull.... You can guess the rest. Hooves running on grass. Boom. Scream. End of the murderer.
Yet I don't think he was that sort of writer generally - I mean of horror stories; he wrote country (Devon) novels about villagers and farmers and the love affairs and so on.
A novel by Phillpotts was turned into a play which ran in London's West End for a long spell. When my father and mother met in London in the twenties they went to see it. And enjoyed it. Later in 1928 it was made into a film, one of Alfred Hitchcock's early silent films.
I see from Google that a theatre group in a place called Tickenham (no, not Twickenham) are staging "The Farmer's Wife" on the 18th of November to the 22nd November this year. Wish Tickenham was bit closer to Cardiff.
I did once see Eden Phillpotts on TV. John Betjeman went down to Devon to interview him. He was then a very old man (he died aged 98); it was obvious that Betjeman admired him tremendously. Maybe because as well as being a popular novelist he was also a recognised poet.
Though most, if not all, of Phillpott's works are now out of print, it is possible to get some on Amazon and other sites for a quid or two. Think I'll get one.

Janacek

I once had, a long time ago when I was a student, a terrible argument with a man who knew more about music than I did and so he won the argument. It was over Janacek's opera "Jenufa".
Now, what I know about opera can be written on a single piece of notepaper but I had been to see the opera and I hadn't liked it. This music professor (something like that) had a great knowledge of the composer and his opera and proceeded to lambast me with arguments, with facts and opinions. Opinions which I could not contest through lack of knowledge.
I had merely said that I thought "Jenufa" was a silly work - the story I meant; the music was to me a bit atonal - "modern".
Ever since that encounter I have had a deep disliking of anything written by Janacek. I sort of refuse to listen to his music, saying to myself, after a few bars, "rubbish".It's as if I am all the time trying to prove that I had been right in my contention that the opera was no good.
The opera is about a young woman, Jenufa, who gets herself pregnant; her mother decides that this shame is unliveable with and she throws the baby into the icy river. The townspeople set upon her (can't remember what happens next) and Jenufa then makes it up with a boyfriend who is decent and kind, nothing like the jerk who made her pregnant.
I hated the story. I hated the mother who killed the baby; I hated ber because I did not believe anyone could, due to shame, do such a thing. I didn't take to Jenufa very much..... It was all a bit Mills and Boonish.
I could go on with my prejudices but I won't because I have just been reading about Janacek and he is a kind of appealing sort of fellow.
I must try him out again. Though there is that fanfare for trumpets, Synfonia? (or whatever it's called) standing between me and him: it's popular - as popular as Jenufa - but I hate it, I detest it.... almost as much as that fanfare for the common man by Aaron Copland. God, what a dreadful bore that is!

K's Bus Journey

I'll call him K (as Kafka does of his central character in "The Trial"). I've known him a long time but hadn't seen him for a few years. So we talked about old times and new times, how the world had changed and how daft some of the politically correct happenings were. How the police made mistakes and didn't answer calls.... There was the woman whose shed was being broken into; she called the police twice but they didn't come, so she called them a third time and told them not to worry about coming now, she'd sort things out herself; she said she'd use her gun. Within three minutes two police cars arrived together with a helicopter hovering over her back garden.
K had his own story to tell involving an official - a bus driver.
After having a few drinks with his friends in the centre of Cardiff he was waiting with, he said, about eight people at the usual stop when the 49 bus, the last bus of the night to Rumney, went straight past them without stopping. What could he do but get a taxi home? So he hailed a taxi and was half way to his destination when he caught sight of the 49 bus which the taxi had evidently overtaken; he jumped out of the taxi and waited for the bus at a stop. This time it did stop to pick him up.
He said to the driver: "You let ten people (the number had increased) standing at the bus stop in Westgate Street."
"I didn't," said the driver.
"You did," said K, fuming. "Fifteen of us (!!!) were left there. I had to get a taxi."
"I stopped," the driver insisted.
K, still fuming, sat down. But the bus didn't move. Suddenly the lights went out and the driver stormed out saying as he went "I've had enough, I'm going."
So there they were, the late night passengers, sitting on the bus, no lights on, with the driver, head in hands, sitting on a wall outside.
A drunk got up and made his way to the front. "I'll drive the xxxxxxx thing," he said.
He was restrained.
Then the passengers turned on K. "It's all your fault.... what did you want to upset him for?" etc.
K said: "There we were, about twenty of us (!!!!!), at the bus stop...."
Then a little, kind old lady - you always get one on a late night bus full of drunks - she got up and went out to speak to the driver who, after a while, got back to his seat and drove everyone home.
K said nothing for the rest of the journey.

Religiosos

Religiosos: religious fanatics who wish to try to convert people. People like me.
I feel I must have that sort of face that attracts them. Maybe they see that there's be a challenge in trying to convert me to their particular faith; or maybe they see an easy one to convert so that it'll knock their "converting points" up for the day. Or maybe because when they smile and say "Hi" I always smile back and say "Hi" to them.
Then I always say "You are going to try and convert me to your faith aren't you?"
"What makes you think that?" they say.
"There's a sparkle in your eyes that tells me that inside that skull of yours there's a burning fire of fanaticism...."
No, I don't say that. I say "Well aren't you?"
"All I want to do is make you aware of...."
That's when I get "the message", "the punch line", "the commercial" so to speak.
I have been approached by Krishna Whatevers, by Mormons, by little old ladies who speak in quiet tones about the world to come and many others.
I always leave with "literature". Which I sometimes read.
This morning I bought some bacon from a young black man in a supermarket. Very nice, friendly guy about twenty three.
"What's the bacon like?" I asked him.
"Good," he said. "So I'm told. I don't eat it."
"Why not?"
"I don't eat pig or black pudding. Blood!"
"Vegetarian?"
"No."
Then a new look came into his eyes. It signalled Religioso.
"Don't," I said, walking away. "I don't want to know."

Golf and Socialism

I used to have a friend who was a socialist. No. Correction. I think he must have been a communist. He must have been since he hated America so deeply. He didn't hate Americans - a bit like Tony Benn there who always said he didn't dislike Americans, after all he married one (which I always thought was a bit of a "get-out") - what he hated was America's policies abroad. He'd say something like "the Americans have broken 25 (or was it a 100?) treaties in the last twenty years...." And if I were to say, back then, that it was a disgrace that the Russians were waging war against the Afghans he would go very quiet indeed.
He would not go to see American films. He would not buy anything associated with America. When he bought a car it was a Swedish one (socialist country don't you know?).
One day we were out having a few drinks and lunch at a pub when he noticed that people were watching golf on the TV. "Golf!" he said scornfully. "Dreadful."
I wondered what he meant.
"Do you like golf?" he asked.
I said no because I was not any good at it. But I had the feeling this was not about if I enjoyed the game or not; I felt the question had deeper connotations.
This morning I read a passage in a book called "Black and White" by Shiva Naipaul (brother of the other Naipaul, the one with the Nobel Prize for literature, the awkward one, the beastly one - though I have to say I have a strange sort of liking for the old curmudgeon); it was about Guyana - Shiva Nailpaul was there investigating the Jonestown massacre.
"The golf course," he wrote, "a relic of the displaced planter regime, was set amidst the fields. Before the sugar estates were nationalised, the road leading to it used to be well maintained. Since then nature had been given a free hand and its deterioration had been swift. Golf and those who played it had no place in a society that was moving inexorably to socialism."
Get it? Golf: clubbish, elitist, played by people with wealth. Socialism: for everyone, fair to everyone, a way of life for everyone to enjoy the benefits of.
Er.... maybe.
Now I think I know what my friend was thinking when he said, so scornfully, "Golf!".

Tossa del Mar

A long time back we had a holiday in Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava. Not much of a place I thought at first but lively, plenty going on there especially in the evenings. Swim in the clear water in the day and go to a restaurant in the evening: a few drinks, something Spanish to eat, a few more drinks then.... well, a few more drinks.
Across the street from the restaurant was a bar with a few tables and a floor for dancing. A lively but not wild place, no lager louts in those days, a sort of middle-class respectable crowd seemed to gather there. Among them was a group of five or six men, not young, not old, that in between age when, if they were married, they were "settled", and if they weren't they were ready to meet "someone nice", or maybe not so nice.
One of them was a little older than the others, tall, well dressed, handsome with a shock of blonde hair, weighty but, you could see by the way he danced, quite lithe and athletic. He was a real charmer of the ladies, he danced well, talked a lot which seemed to amuse his partners...
What brought this scene back to mind was listening to the Alan Tichmarsh programme, "Memories for You", this evening; he played "Someone to Watch over me" the Gershwin number sung by Ella Fitzgerald. Which brought back the memory that at the bar across the street the music they mostly played over the speakers were records of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.
It was very pleasant sitting there, my wife and I, watching the goings on in the bar and on the dance floor.
Then suddenly, every evening, the lights would be turned off and a sort of luminous glow would light the place - I think it might have been ultra violet rays. This had the effect of lighting only those parts of the clothing that, I guessed, had been washed in detergent, so that the collars and shirts could be seen moving about though you couldn't see the persons in them. But you could always pick out one of them - the guy I mentioned, the tall, good-looking one, the charmer: he was the only one who must have washed not only his shirt but his hair as well in detergent because there he was, his cuffs showing white at the end of his black jacket, his shirt collar white, and above it, no head, just this mop of persil-white hair.
Incidentally, there's something else I remember about Tossa del Mar: it has a superb art gallery of hundreds (it seemed to me) of paintings and drawings by Salvador Dali. Even those who hate his work I'm sure would be impressed with this collection; it demonstrates what a fantastic craftsman he was - if, maybe, not much else.

Mirrors

That old mirror problem cropped up again in The Daily Telegraph: why was one's reflection in the mirror turned around but not upturned. So a letter appeared explaining the phenomenon.
It's not a phenomenon; it's quite simple. The image is not one that looks as if you have done a 180 degree turn if you were, magically, to be able to stand where the reflection is, otherwise your right hand would be on the left and your left hand on the right. Which they are not.
This took me back to my youth at school when we were given for homework the task of drawing our faces as seen in a mirror. I found this rather awkward to do - the mirror kept sliding or whatever - so I thought "The hell with this," and got out a photograph and copied that.
Our art master was a bit of a tyrant, rather frightening, brilliant but scarey. I presented him with my effort: me looking from a page of my artbook out at him.
"You didn't use a mirror, as I wanted," he said.
"Yes, sir, I did," I answered, chest out.
"Why then is your hair parted on the wrong side?"
"Huh!"
In those days the old stick was wielded on hands and bottoms and the old hand was slapped across heads.... I felt the old, hard slap of the hand on the back of my head and was told to get back to my seat; as I did so I felt my work of art, thrown angrilly by the teacher, give me an extra whack on the head.
The question must therefore be: why does a photograph reverse the image left to right but not up and down?
As another letter in The Telegraph put it: before I try to answer that I think I'll reflect on it a while.

Orphans of the Storm

In the college where I taught for some ten years we were asked to provide classes for adults who did not attend the college; I chose "Films" as my subject.
I thought I'd start by giving a talk on the silent film director D. W. Griffth, famous for two big films: "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance". I hired a Griffith film from the British Film Institute; or, rather, a sort of compilation film lasting about half an hour - scenes from one of his films put together so that it worked quite well as a story. It was called "Orphans of the Storm" and starred the then famous Lillian Gish.
It was set in the French revolution and some of it was, quite blatantly, taken stright from Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities".
The courses were advertised in the local area and quite a lot of people turned up for some of the courses on offer - but no one turned up for my course.
So, the next day, when I had a class in General Studies on "Films", I showed the D. W. Griffith film to the class of about twenty young men and wondered how this old, silent film would go down with them.
They watched it in silence and at the end we discussed things about it - the French Revolution, the director, the actress, Dickens's novel and so on.
In the General Studies course on films which went right through the year I showed all sorts of films, most of them fairly modern, talkies I mean: "12 Angry Men", "The Third Man", "Shane" I recall.
At the end of the course I asked them what film they had enjoyed most and they pretty well all said "Orphans of the Storm".
At first I couldn't believe it; then I thought back to seeing it myself and I thought "Yes, it was a damn good film."

Cartoons

I have a couple of ideas for cartoons, but I can't draw them; all I can do is write the caption.
There was a tutor at the adult education college I used to attend whose course was "Cartoons". One evening he gave us on the writers' course a short lecture on what he did. "You don't have to be able to draw well to make a cartoon," he began.
Well, most of the cartoons I have seen over the years in such magazines as Punch and The New Yorker and more recently in The Spectator have been the work of highly skilled artists. Some are not too well executed but these are few and far between.
Yet James Thurber, who was not a good drawer, had tremendous success at The New Yorker. Paul Johnson in last week's Spectator writes about him and, in comparing him to Matisse, who could draw well, says: "Personally, I would rather own a good Thurber joke than anything in Le Maitre's entire oeuvre."
He tells of how Thurber would doodle and produce with a few lines a sketch of, say, a seal; then he'd give it a caption; later he'd draw something the seal is sitting on maybe.... Eventually a cartoon with caption would be formed.
That's one way of doing it. The trouble with my ideas is that having thought up the cartoon in every detail first, I know what I want to draw but can't draw it.
I could, of course, try to get someone else to draw it, or send the idea off to a magazine maybe.
Well, I don't know anyone who could draw it, so sending the idea off to a magazine might be a better option.
Not on your life, Matey!
I met the wife of a professional cartoonist who told me that her husband often sent work out but occasionally it would be refused and then, later, he would see the same idea used by someone else. He never complained, she said, in case it ruined - wait for it - the good relationship he had built up over the years..... blah, blah, blah....
Good relationship, my foot! Let me tell you, it's a jungle out there.

Oliver Stone

Someone was interviewing Oliver Stone for The Times; he thought his new film "W" was poor and that he considered Stone's "masterpiece" to be "Wall Street". I would agree on "Wall Street" being his best film but I'm not sure about "masterpiece".
He seems to me to have had a great big chip - if not a boulder - on his shoulders as regards Vietnam. This is not surprising since he served there in the war. When he came home he made a series of films which condemned in various ways the American involvement in the war. His bitterness probably would have consumed him entirely if he had not been able to contain it within the body of those films. A psychiatrist once said "If you have problem then tell it in the form of a story." That's what, it seems to me, Oliver Stone did. Otherswise he might have gone mad.
Then, when he had got that out of his system he turned his bile on "the establishment" in the form of Wall Street, Nixon, the forces against Kennedy and now George W. Bush - his new film "W".
When he was thinking of making "Nixon" he wanted Anthony Hopkins to play the lead; Hopkins dithered and wondered if he would and dithered some more like Caesar refusing the crown.... until Stone said "If you don't want the part I'll see if Gary Oldman will do it." "I'll do it," Anthony Hopkins instantly said.
Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic had a particular dislike of two film makers, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone. When she eventually retired she wrote how sorry she was to give up her job but that one thing she'd be looking forward to was "not having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie".
I think I know what she means. Though "Wall Street" is good.

Giving the end away

Why is it that some reviewers, particularly of films, often give the end away when they must know that readers want to enjoy the work without knowing who done it or if the girl does get off with the lord of the manor or if the bloke does win a hundred thousand pounds at poker - or whatever.
I think there is an attitude among critics that indicates their contempt for the storyline; surely, they think, what matters is the meaning of the work, what it tells us about life etc.
I have just read a piece by Jeremy Clarke in his "Low Life" regular section in The Spectator in which he tells of going to see the film "Taken"; he not only decribes what goes on in the film, all the killings and torturings, but tells the reader what happens at the end of the film when the girl..... No, you won't get me doing such an underhand and plainly petty thing as to give away the end.
The thing is that Clarke disliked the film so much, disaproved of it so much that he couldn't believe that any sensible, intelligent human being would like it or approve of it. So it wouldn't spoil our fun if he revealed the end.
Luckily I have already seen the film and. contrary to most critics' opinions, I enjoyed it as a sort of adult "boys own" story. OK it was pretty nasty but the characters the hero was up against were more than pretty nasty.
Unlike seeing, say, "Hamlet" when I know the story well and know how it ends, this film is exciting because you wonder how it will turn out. With "Hamlet" you don't; you enjoy it for other reasons.

Starvation

A long time ago when I was a student I was returning from a holiday in France with no French money in my pocket so I was unable to buy anything to eat. I hadn't eaten for a whole day and I was now, the next day, on a train travelling across France to Calais where I'd take the boat to England.
I was starving. The hours went by and I was getting desperate. Sitting across from me in the compartment was a group of young people who proceeded to take out food from bags - boiled eggs, bread, this and that. This of course made things worse for me. I felt like grabbing something from them but I didn't; I felt like asking, begging them for a crust of bread but I didn't. I put up with it for the whole seemingly interminable journey. And I thought I felt that I knew what starving was like.
But I didn't know what starving was like. The sort of starvation that occurs in some countries like Ethiopia is 100 - no - 10000 times worse than what I had suffered.
The children's story "Handsel and Gretel" always intrigued me: I found it amusing and a bit, as a kid, frightening; but I never really understood what their problem was at the beginning of the story when the father (or was it the mother? Or stepmother or stepfather?) takes the two children into the woods to..... well, to get rid of them.
How could people do such a thing? Well, I thought, it's only a fairy story.
I went to see Englebert Humperdink's opera "Handsel and Gretel" a few months ago and the same problem of the parents abandonment of their children still troubled me (though in the opera there is not so deliberate an abandonment as in the original story). How could people do such a thing to innocent children?
Then I read a report of what had happened to a village in the Ukraine when Stalin had deprived the villagers of food so that most of them starved to death. And I read about some of the horrific things that happened there. In particular of a woman who had eaten her own child.
It was then I understood what the story of Hansel and Gretel was really about.
I still recall my train journey when I was hungry, but I wasn't starving. Far, far from it.

What does it mean?

How is it that two adult, male theatre reviewers are so diametrically opposed in their viewpoints about a play? Charles Spencer in The Telegraph went almost overboard with his encomiums while Quentin Letts in The Daily Mail thought the play "a stinker".
Harold Pinter's play "No Man's Land" was the play under discussion.
There's something about Pinter that makes some people squirm with dissatifaction at not knowing what is going in. Someone (I think it was Alan Brien) said about Pinter's plays that they were like Who-Dun-Its without the body. Then - I knew one who was a member of the Pinter appreciation society (or whatever it was called) - there are those who find his plays fascinating. And deep.
They are so deep in fact that no one seems able to say what they are about.
So why don't they ask Pinter himself?
Because, probably, he doesn't know.
I was once at a weekend get together with a famous film critic giving a series of talks on famous films; one of the films under discussion was "Last Year at Marienbad", a very obscure film with a story, if indeed there was a story, that was not an obvious series of events. It was more like a dream.
I had a theory about what it was about and spouted it to the assembled group. Everyone was interested. Yes, they agreed, that must have been what it was about....
But the course tutor was unconvinced and slightly irritated I felt. He preferred it that the film remained obscure, difficult, not easily explained. I had taken away the mystery of it all. It wasn't a Who-Dun-It after all.
So perhaps Pinter is best left alone. For as T.S.Eliot said when he was approached by a journalist about a play he had written who asked him: "What does the play mean Mr Eliot?"
"It means what it said," replied the great man. "If it had meant anything else I'd have said so."

Pirandello

A couple of months ago I wrote a short play called "The Return of Lady Bracknell". An amateur group is rehearsing Oscar Wilde's play "The Importance of being Ernest" but the woman who is billed to play Lady Bracknell is ill. There's a knock on the door and who should be there ready to take over the part? None other than the real Lady Bracknell.
But of course she isn't real. She never was real. She's a charcter in a play so she can't be real.
However, after some perverse reaction to her presence, the group accepts her and she plays in their performance (the "Handbag Scene" of course).
It didn't worry me that a fictional character becomes real suddenly. The play was a joke. I think it works. At the end of the play she disappears and the group talk about their next production - "The Hound of the Baskervilles". Needless to say a character from that famous novel is ready to appear. I won't tell you which one. You may guess it correctly, you may not. It's not so obvious as all that.
I wonder if Pirandello had a similar thing in mind when he had his six characters introduce themselves to a producer saying that they are in search of an author.
My play is a joke play. Pirandello's has been given the honour of being taken seriously: a play about reality - what is it? And so on.
Lloyd Evans in this week's Spectator has a real bash at Pirandello and at the play "Six Characters in Search of an Author": "Pirandello, the master of pretentious bombast," he writes, "is perhaps the most talent-free of all Nobel laureates."
I have never understood what the play is trying to say - if anything. It is a serious play not a joke play like mine and it has been taken seriously by critics over the years.
I have seen one production of it and I found it fascinating. This was an amateur production in Cardiff by a very good group, done about thirty years ago.
I have read that the production Evans saw is the one that started life out in Chichester this year and has been panned by both lovers and haters of Pirandello. I think if Lloyd Evans saw a more traditional version of the play he would be surprised to find that the play works very well.
Sit there and let yourself get involved with the characters and you'll find the play as fascinating as I do; but don't think too much about whether it "analyses the relationship between fiction and reality."
My play doesn't analyse anything. It's done for laughs.
O yes, and the character from Conan Doyle's novel that turns up at the end is .... the hound.

Inventors

Preston Sturges before he became a writer and then a director of films, invented a lip-stick which he called 'Desti's Red Red Rouge'; it was sold in his mother's perfume shop called Desti's.
I think a lot of writers, being creative, imaginative people, think of themselves sometimes as inventors. Don't they invent characters, plots?
I used to be a tutor of Creative Writing in an adult education centre. One evening a group of about six people and I were sitting around a table in the bar of the college having a drink. I asked a young woman in the group how her writing was going and she said that she wasn't doing much writing these days because she was tending to concentrate on her invention. Which was? A device attached to the lock of a car door such that a person would be quite safe if the car suddenly came to halt on some lonely road..... Something to that effect anyway (I have to say I didn't understand her precisely).
It was then I said that I too had invented a few things, some of which I had patented. I told the group of one which was a money sorting device..... which, incidentally, didn't work well enough for me to continue trying to sell it.
Then another of the group said he too had a couple of ideas for inventions....
And so it was that it turned out that every one of the group had, at some time, invented some device or other but which they had either never actually made into a prototype or just kept in their minds. But you could see that when they began tallking about their inventions they were full of enthusiasm.
I came to the conclusion with which I set out this blog: that fiction writers are inventors - some of characters and plots only, others who would like to make things that do a job of work.
One ex- pilot who had been in the airforce in WW2 said he had an idea once which he thought to exploit at some time but never did: it was a dog's lead with a suction device where the end of the lead was held; this suction device could be pressed against a shop window so that the dog's owner could leave the dog attached, so to speak, to the window while he shopped inside.
However, someone suggested that it wouldn't be much use for something like a rottweiller which, seeing a cat across the street might in his effort to get to the cat, take the shop's window with him.
"For little dogs only," the pilot said.