Klimt and Cook

I was surprised to read that, a couple of years ago, one of Gustav Klimt's paintings was, second to a Picasso, the dearest painting in the world to be sold at auction. I don't like the stuff. It reeks of interior design to me.
Klimt was obsessed with the female figure to such an extent that there is hardly any other figure or scene in his works not having as its chief topic the female form. He seemed to be so obsessed with it that all other thoughts were buried beneath it; there is no thought in his paintings, only design. The fact that they have sold so well may be because they are so glossy and rich looking and that these aspects are mistaken for "art".
Beryl Cook too was an obsessional painter only she was obsessed with the female form in a different way: she presented groteque versions of females - always haveing innocent fun. There is no fun in Klimt's paintings, only the female form in all its glory or, if not in its nude glory, then draped with glory in the form of excessively gaudy colour.
I cannot say that I like either Klimt or Cook but I admire Cook more for her honesty in depicting women she liked, doing things she would have enjoyed doing herself if she had had the nerve to attempt them.
While about Beryl Cook there is an aura of Mary Whitehouse, about Gustav Klimt there is an aura of decadence.

The Letter

I was doing a stint of reviewing, covering the student drama festival for a week; by the time Thursday had come I had had enough, thank you very much. I had sat through play after avante garde play that probably meant a lot to the authors but meant little to me, and what's more did not entertain me either.
So I took an afternoon off and went to see Somerset Maugham's "The Letter" in the New Theatre, Cardiff. It had Honor Blackman in the cast as the woman who shoots her lover and gets away with the crime (to a certain degree anyway). I thought "What a fantastically good play this is." I still think it an excellent play but it was "fantastically" good then because it was being compared conciously and maybe unconciously too with all those student productions I had seen.
The film is better than that production. Bette Davies at her troubled finest, with Herbert Marshall as her long suffering husband. But the great performance in the film comes from someone whose name is not exactly a household name: James Stevenson.
He was nominated for an oscar but did not get it - he should have. It was one of those performances that only a supporting actor can give - astonishing because you don't expect it.
I am told that Jerry Lewis used to give a funny imitation of Bette Davies in "The Letter": sucking on a cigarette, then tapping its ash everywhere and, like some caged animal pacing back and fo, he'd say: "I must get that damned letter back."
Not funny to tell but I'm told it was.
Nothing like Bette Davies of course, except in the distraught desperation.

Beryl Cook

Now that Beryl Cook has died there seems to be a much greater interest in her paintings than before. Why is that? What is so interesting today in her works that wasn't so interesting yesterday? Is it something to do with the art market? I don't see how that can be since the art market depends surely on what is popular. So, I ask again, why is Beryl Cook taken more seriously as an artist today than before when she was alive?
She has always been popular with "the ordinary person" for a long time, yet the cognescenti have never taken her work seriously, deriding it as trite or "like seaside postcards" that anybody could paint. She didn't "say anything" through her works, except the obvious - that that's how life looks to me. She could never be hung next to serious artists. She would be completely out of place in The Tate for example.
But now she has died maybe she has achieved some kind of status that she could not have attained when she was alive. Simply because she is dead?
A quite famous poet and playwright came to Cardiff University some years ago as "Writer in Residence". He put on a few new plays of his, got involved in student activities, worked hard to help writers with their work; but, he told a friend of mine, "no one in the English Department of the University wants to know me."
He wondered why this was so. So did my friend.
I told him: "They'd have been interested in him, maybe, if he had been dead."
Dead men don't answer back. Dead men have no theories about their work. Dead men - and dead women like Beryl Cook - have no way of saying "what you are saying about me is just not true."
Beryl Cook never wanted her works to be hung in The Tate. I hope they never are - for her sake.

To Gloria, who commented on my "Edgar Wallace" blog of 21st. April: I was wrong. I've looked up the reference in Emlyn Williams's autobiography, "Emlyn", and not found that Edgar Wallace was involved in the sacking of someone who was gay; though there is a section in which a man, found to be gay, is ignored or maybe asked to leave, or just leaves - there is a little confusion there I think. It's on Pages 124 and 125 of the book and concerns an actor named Brian Aherne (whom I recalled, erroneously, was EdgarWallace). Hope that clears it up.

Lady Hamilton

There's an interview with Gore Vidal in The Spectator this week where he tells the interviewer to get a copy of the film "That Lady Hamilton" - "Get it out," he said. "You'll never stop crying."
I remember seeing the film many years ago but I didn't cry. It had Laurence Olivier as Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton and it didn't make much impression on me.
I was surprised to see, looking up Google, that there were two writers of the film script one of whom was R.C.Sherriff, whose most famous play is "Journey's End".
My favourite play of Sherriff's is "Badger's Green". Or rather, it was. I'm not sure if it would work now on stage, a bit old fashioned, probably out of date now.
I wrote a play about the first world war called "Aspects of War"; it played for a few nights in Cardiff only to be forgotten.
One of the cast said to me later, on his seeing "Journey's End" : "Your play is better than that."
Well, Sherriff's play is still going strong after many, many years while mine..... Never mind.
Incidentally, I prefer the Terence Rattigan's play about the Nelson/Hamilton affair - "A Bequest to the Nation".

To "gloria" who commented on my piece on "Edgar Wallace" (April 21st.): I will look up the reference to Emlyn Williams and Charles Laughton and tell you which page its on in a future blog. Thanks for the remarks, enjoyed them.

To "anonymous" who commented on "Cats In Sitges" (April 24th) : Good to hear the cats are still there. Interesting what you say about them. Maybe they are "protected" by the local authority as a tourist attraction.

To "anonymous" who commented on "Short Stories" (10th Feb.) : Yes, blogs are no substitute for short stories. What to do? Not much I'm afraid, though American mags are still publishing some and I believe Canada is quite strong in this field too. It's a tough world for writers and it seems to be getting tougher.
A Cardiff based literary agent asked me what advice I'd give to new writers; I said:"If they're going to invest any money in it, put it on a horse instead." Wish I could be more hopeful but, alas, I can't.

Girls and Boys

Are there any differences between girls and boys apart from the obvious ones?
Well, a friend of mine who was a teacher for some time said there was a big difference: boys tended to think abstractly while girls thought practically.
How did she know this?
Well, one day she said, for fun, to her mixed class of eight year olds: "What is the length of a piece of string?"
The boys considered the problem.
A girl had an immediate answer. Holding her two hands up, palms facing each other, the distance between them being about 12 inches, she said excitedly: "Miss, this long."

Alan Brien

I always admired Alan Brian's journalism, though I remember it chiefly for his film and theatre criticisms. They were incisive, humorous pieces, enjoyable in the way that they can be when critics go to the theatre to enjoy themselves (some, I feel, go there not to).
He was a contemporary of Kenneth Tynan, as good a writer but not quite so deep in his analyses.
Auberon Waugh apparently used to write a satirical column in Private Eye in which he parodied Brian's style. I am not surprised at this because Auberon Waugh, like his father Evelyn Waugh, could take against a person for his politics, opinions or even looks to an almost venomous extent; but also Auberon might have known of his father's intense dislike on first meeting Alan Brian who had been invited to join a friend of his at White's Club: "What's someone like this doing here?" he asked Brian's friend scornfully.
I have to say I have had my fill of The Waughs. If I never hear of them again that'll be too soon. But I wish I did not admire Evelyn Waugh so much as a novelist.
I think it was Alan Brian who said, in my opinion, something very true about Harold Pinter's plays; he said words to the effect that "his plays are like 'who-dunnits' without the body".
Alan Brian died on May 23rd. this year aged 83.

John, who commented on my blog on Jack Benny. Thanks for your remarks: you are right about Mel Brooks re-making "To Be Or Not To Be" and that maybe the presence of Jack Benny in the original made the difference between a good film and one not so good, though I have to say that although I praised Benny highly I should too have drawn attention to the fact that Ernst Lubisch directed it; he always did something wonderful to his films and possibly Mel Brookes's coarseness (usually deliberate) contributed to the re-make's failure.

Best short story

Taki, writing in The Spectator this week, says he would have given his soul to have written "Catcher in the Rye". He goes on to mention some other works of literature he thinks great: "Moby Dick", great but not as great as "Tender is the Night" by Scott Fitzgerald (I prefer his "The Great Gatsby"); but his "two bibles" are "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Moveable Feast", both by Ernest Hemingway.
I can't say I have a favourite great novel though I am tempted to say Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brothers" but the trouble is I haven't finished it yet - and it's going to take some time before I do. It is not what they call "a page turner". Page turners are not necessarilly great works simply because they are so exciting you cannot put them down. Great works of literature have a more lasting value, they stay with you for longer than the thrill of the story.
I do, however, have a favourite short story which may qualify as being "great", and that is "The Country Husband" by John Cheever. It's quite a long short story so I did not read it at one sitting. The truth is that I could have but didn't want to. Because whenever I picked it up again (and this I did many times) I started at the beginning again. I savoured every line of it. When, eventually, I did finish it, I put it on a shelf and take it down occasionally to re-read, then completing it in one sitting.
I don't know if it qualifies as "great". It's intriguing. It is beautifully written. It is sad. It is highly enjoyable.
If only I could write a story as good as that.
There is another short story I found as compelling as that but not for anything like the same reason - and it is his only story I find I can read right through - and that is Richard Brautigan's "1/3, 1/3, 1/3", which I think is the funniest story I have ever read.
It begins:

"It was all to begin in thirds. I was to get 1/3 for doing the typing, and she was to get 1/3 for doing the editing, and he was to get 1/3 for writing the novel.
We were going to divide the royalties three ways. We all shook hands on the deal, each knowing what we were supposed to do, the path before us, the gate at the end.
I was made a 1/3 partner because I had the typewriter."

Villains

I shall never forget going to the local theatre to see a production of a popular play by the local drama group only to find that I was one of about five people there. Why? Because it was being played on the same night that had the death of J.R. in "Dallas" on TV. One had to stay in to see that, of course. The fact that I didn't meant that I wasn't a "Dallas" fan.
But it did make me wonder why villains are so popular.
Hitchcock said: "The more successful the villian, the more successful the picture."
Applies to books too. Think "Flashman". Think "Steerforth". Think "Hannibal Lecter", "Moriarty", "Spectre", and of course J.R.
Notice they are all quite sophisticated guys, intelligent, charming, cultured. And usually English!
My favourite is James Steerforth, David Copperfield's best friend who runs off with Ham's fiancee. And David never feels anything but admiration for him, bordering on love. What a cad he is! How vile he is! Yet there's something about him that's larger than life, something about the way he can stick two fingers up to all that is decent and respectable - and get away with it.

Bores

Someone in The Telegraph yesterday was writing about the Duke of Edinburgh's response to a TV gardener at the Chelsea Flower Show who not only corrected the Duke on a mistake he had made in identifying a certain plant but then proceeded to talk about the plant at length, imagining he was entertaining the Duke; the Duke walked off, muttering under his breath: "I don't want a bloody lecture."
Why did the man have to go on and on about his particular interest as if his listener, in this case the Duke, would be also has interested as he? In other words - people can be real bores when they believe they are being informative.
How do you cope with this sort of person? Well, the writer says you say "We must do lunch sometime...." having no intention of doing any such thing, and walking away. Or "Lovely to have met you...." not meaning a word of it but moving away as he says it.
I used to know a bore.... No, not a bore, the bore of all bores. I shall call him G.W.
G.W. could have bored the skin off a corpse.
One day, at lunch, sitting next to him, I made the mistake of asking him how his operation for something or other went. Half an hour later we had made it to the stairs leading to the library and his story of his visit to the hospital had only got as far as his leaving the house in an ambulence.
I said: "Sorry G.W. but I have to go to the library for something." He said "For what?" I said "A book." He said "What book?"
But by now I had managed to move away. "See you at the Christmas function," he said.
"Like Hell I will," I thought, waving happily to him as I left.
Yet, would you believe it? he was one of the best actors/comedians/singers I had in the group I used to get together for my college's Christmas panto. Then he was not a bore at all. He was the villain in Alladin or the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk or whatever.
The thing was - he wasn't himself for a while.

Reviewing Books

I was doing a bit of reviewing of books for a fairly new newspaper called "Wales on Sunday". The features editor, an old-school newspaper man, would show me a cupboard full of brand new books sent to him by many publishers in the hope that they would be reviewed. "Take your choice," he'd say.
I tended to take crime novels and books that were not too large.
One day he said "This looks like a rather good book." It was a very thick book which, according to the blurb, was about the attempted shooting of the Pope.
"Bit on the long side," I said, thinking of the few quid I'd be getting, long book or short.
"You don't have to read it all," he said. "Just read the blurb and get the jist of it."
Which brings to mind Samuel Johnson who said he never finished books. One day a friend of his said he had just completed reading a book. Johnson said with some astonishment: "Not right through, surely!"
Apropos reviewing of books, there's an interesting letter in today's Times:

"Sir, Upon receiving an unsolicited novel, Benjamin Franklin replied: 'Many thanks for your book. I shall waste no time in reading it.' "

Robbie Burns

Frieda Hughes every Monday in The Times writes a short piece on a poem or poems she has chosen; this week she chose three short poems by Robert Burns. Here's one of them:

On a Hen-pecked Country Squire:

As father Adam first was fooled
(A case that's still too common)
Here lies a man a woman ruled -
The devil ruled the woman.

It isn't a great poem by any stretch but it is one you can quote and laugh about or be annoyed at if you see it as anti-feminine. It is a poem that is easy to understand and one that rhymes, which is more than can be said for a great deal of modern poetry.
Modern poetry, modern music, modern art all seem to have turned in on themselves, so to speak, so that they tend to appeal to "insiders" only, those who are able, so they maintain, to understand and appreciate what the artist is saying and doing.
As Dana Gioia, the American poet, says: "Like subsidised farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibilty of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy."

James Stewart

James Stewart was born a hundred years ago, died in 1997.
Mark Stein wrote this about him as an actor: "He played heroes, but they tended to be nervous heroes, men of exceptional courage who nevertheless, in defiance of the cliche, did know the meaning of the word 'fear'..... Stewart was the only golden-age leading man secure enough to show real fear."
For Stein there's a James Stewart moment in an early film called "Born to Dance" when Stewart sings (yes, he sings) "You'd be so easy to love", a Cole Porter number.
My James Stewart moment occurs at the end of the film "The Man who shot Liberty Valence" when he's on a train with his bitter-lipped wife (she had loved the John Wayne character but had married the James Stewart character) and he asks the train's conductor if the train could go a little faster as he has an important appointment. The man replies: "Anything for the man who shot Liberty Valence". And you get that James Stewart look, the one that says "I'm presenting this face of a Senator to the world but deep inside is the lie I have lived desiring to come out and reveal itself". He could do shiftiness without being shifty.
He had not, of course, shot the villain Liberty Valence, so he was living a lie. We all know who shot him don't we? John Wayne shot him.
But the great irony of the film is that the super hero, John Wayne, shot him in the back.
James Stewart was a WW2 war hero, a pilot who flew many missions and won awards; but when he returned to Hollywood he never spoke of it, and was fearful of flying. Probably he learnt what real fear was in the war and was able after the war to depict it in the characters he played - particularly in his westerns and in "Rear Window" and "Vertigo".

Ionesco

Someone from the Radio Times asked me to do an interview with a disc jockey. I said I was not a pop music fan but I was told that didn't matter, they just wanted some personal stuff about the man. So off I went to the BBC. We sat down and we talked. I asked him who had influenced him most and he said a name of someone I had never heard of. So we sat there a bit longer. I smiled. He smiled. Then he said: "How did they come to send you to interview me?"
A few years earlier than that I almost had a chance to interview Eugene Ionesco, the avante garde playwright. The features editor of the paper I worked for said that since Mr Ionesco was in Cardiff perhaps I could get to interview him for the paper.
I didn't know what to say except "Help".
Then he said: "You do speak French don't you? Ionesco doesn't speak English but he does speak French."
"No," I said, truthfully, though if I had been able to speak French, I'd have said "no" just the same, because that truly would have been the most embarrassing moment of my life - more embarrassing than "How did they come to send you to interview me?"
I knew that Ionesco wrote plays; one play had a couple of people living quite normal lives with a rhinoceros sitting there in the room with them.
I wrote plays about people sitting in a room with no sign of a rhinoceros, in the room or within the nearest thousand miles of the room.
That evening I went to a lecture given by Ionesco at Cardiff University. He spoke in Hungarian, I think it was, which somebody translated into French which someone else then translated into English. Everything reached such a measure of confusion that I thought "This is just like a play by Ionesco."
I waited to see if a rhinoceros would appear but it didn't.

Tramps

There were "tramps" roaming the country when I was a kid. I remember one calling at our house, a dishevelled old man with blue eyes and snow white hair; my mother gave him something to eat and a glass of milk. That's what you'd do in those days; these days you'd probably tell him to "get lost" or use words to that effect!
They never seemed dangerous people then. You felt sorry for them. Maybe they'd been somebody important and had come down on their luck and had nowhere to go. Of course there are plenty of people like that now who live on the streets but they don't roam the country begging, then move on; they lie about on the streets of cities and, well, just stay there.
My father always put a strong case for the life tramps lead - I cannot remember what the case was now but whatever it was he always argued it vehemently. Maybe it had something to do with their being free to choose a way of life unhindered by capitalist forces.... he was strongly on the left at one time but changed over the years to being, well, not so much on the extreme left but sort of centre left.
I am reminded of the great novelist Thomas Mann who, I read somewhere, went the other way, so to speak. Born into a strongly upper class, conservative family of industrialists, as the years went on he gradually became more liberal until at the end, in his 80's, he became a Communist.
There is a new edition of W.H.Davies's famous book just out, "The Autobiography of a Tramp". Now there was a genuine tramp who tramped all over Britain and America. He wanted to be a poet and did not want work to interefere with his ambition.
And indeed he did become a well known poet with a book of poems published, with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw, no less.
I'm afraid I know only one quote from Davies's poems, two lines that everyone knows and which probably sums up his way of life:

"What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?"

Anger

Janice Turner writing in The Times today wonders if we are getting worse in our dealings with other people, getting angry over small matters, drawing knives, road raging etc. Maybe it has something to do with the way we live now, it's all rush and hard work and frustration at little things going wrong.
Maybe.
I can't help thinking of what Fred Zinneman, the film director, said when he was on Desert Island Discs many years ago. He said that if there was an accident on the road with two cars colliding in England, the drivers got out and exchanged addresses and insurance policy info; if the same thing occurred in France the drivers got out and fought each other; and if in Italy they tried to kill each other.
Stereotypes of course. But is there some truth in the remarks? Or is it just old fashioned racialism?

Superman

I read today in The Spectator that the first person to use the word "superman" was George Bernard Shaw. It had been used before that in its German form by Nietzsche in his "Thus Spake Zarasthrusta" - "ubermensch".
Shaw's play "Man and Superman" is a wonderful play, very amusing in the first act (especially in the version I once saw on TV with Peter O'Toole as John Tanner), but its third act, in Hell, is hardly ever played - it is long, has difficult arguments to fathom and seems to have little to do with the dramatic action of the rest of the play. It's Shaw argueing his case, a criticism often thrown at him when he goes off on his high horse about one of his favourite themes.
I saw, at Bristol Old Vic many years ago, a performance of the third act of Man and Superman together with a short play by Chekov, about a professor (I think) who is giving a lecture on "Giving up Smoking", a hilarious one man, one act play (there is an old 33 and a third record of this play in a superb performance by Michael Redgrave which I must look up on Amazon sometime).
That evening at the theatre seeing those two plays by Shaw and Chekov I rate one of the best and most entertaining of my life.
Now The Bristol Old Vic is no more. Let's hope it can be soon resurrected.

Isaac Rosenberg

Until I read about an exhibition in London at the Ben Uri Gallery, I didn't know that Isaac Rosenberg was a painter; he is, of course, well known as a poet, especially of poems about The First World War. His "Poems from the Trenches" is a famous collection of his poems.
But I read that he was at first a painter, chiefly of portraits (chiefly self portraits), having studied at The Slade after leaving school at 16.
Six months before hostilities ended in 1918 Rosenberg was killed; his body, like Kipling's son, was never found. Unlike most war poets he was not only Jewish but a private soldier.
I looked up some of his poems and though I find the language quite difficult they are really impressive, not so melancholy and high-minded and troubled as, say, Wilfred Owen, but earthy and down there with the ordinary soldiers.
And the lice!
When my uncle came home from the war in 1918, my father told me, he was covered from top to toe in lice. My father and his mother ran a bath of water and my uncle got in, clothes still on, then got out naked, free of lice.
Rosenberg writes of lice in the trenches in WW1 in "Louse Hunting".

"Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood."

I must try to visit the exhibition of Rosenberg's paintings, there until June 8th.

Painters

There's a woman of 78 who lives in Hay on Wye and paints, mainly landscapes. When she was getting on in years she said to her daughter; "What are old women supposed to do?" Her daughter said: "You used to be able to draw, why not do that?"
So Jean Millar did draw. And paint. Now she's attained some fame and her paintings sell quite well.
My father took up painting in his seventies. He'd had no training, wasn't particularly good at drawing, but taught himself, first using watercolours then oils. We have a few examples of his work on our walls, most of them copies of famous artists, particularly Van Goch.
He never sold any. Never tried to. Gave some to his sister-in-law and some to my brother.
One, "Ben Gunn's Dream", was an original of his: a small painting of cheeses of various kinds. I like it.
I like it much more than Lucien Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" which sold yesterday for 33.6 million dollars. I think it's ugly.
And I like it much more than any Francis Bacon whose works sell for millions.
But who am I to judge these things? If I draw a cat it looks like a dog and if I draw a dog it looks like a horse.
But now I come to think of it, Francis Bacon couldn't draw either, so he maintained - and I believe him.

Bayonets

My uncle Jesse, the sort of man you'd say about "he wouldn't harm a fly", was a soldier in the First World War. He was first posted to Brecon Barracks for basic training.
He told me that one day they were out "on the square" being told how to use a bayonet. The sergeant in charge of them handed a rifle with bayonet attached to "a volunteer" who, Jesse knew personally, from the same town as him. But the sergeant had picked the wrong volunteer because when he said t0 the volunteer "right then, see if you can bayonet me, young man", believing that he would be able, with his long experience of new recruits, to disarm the man, he found that the volunteer was not a man who gave up easily. The sergeant not only couldn't disarm the man but found himself running away from him, ordering him to put down his bayonet.
"Well," said my uncle, chuckling at the memory, "he chased the sergeant all over the camp. He never actually caught him but I can tell you, knowing the man myself, that if he had, he'd have stuck him, sure enough."
The next day, he told me, every single man was transferred to various other training camps over the country, no two to the same one.
What happened to the volunteer? He didn't know.
What happened to the sergeant? He didn't know that either.
What he did know was that soon he was on his way to France and The Somme.
That he never talked about.

Cyclists

According to the Evening Standard :"Boris Johnson today promised to be more careful on his bike after he was filmed cycling through six red lights, failing to stop at a zebra crossing and mounting the pavement."
Melanie Phillips wrote on her blog : "I have lost count of the times I have been forced to fling myself out of the way of cyclists jumping red lights or failing to stop for pedestrians on crossings. Their anti-social and dangerous, not to say unlawful, behaviour is exceeded in awfulness only by their arrogance.... Now Boris is descending into this self-same pit of moral blackness."
A few months ago I was crossing a dual carriageway in the centre of Cardiff, the green light showing that I could, when a young man on a bike, coming down the street in the wrong direction, on the wrong side of the road, rode straight over my foot.
He slowed and stopped a few yards on, looked back at me and waited for me to go up to him.
I thought "here we go - confrontation - he saying 'what's an old duffer like you...?' etc..., me saying 'you were going the wrong way ... etc..... he saying something about me being an arrogant white, me saying he being a black with a chip on his shoulder....
But before anything was said by me, he said: "I'm terribly sorry sir. You don't have to tell me I was wrong. I really am sorry" in a posh, Southern Counties accent.
"No harm done," I said. "Only in future...."
"I know, sir, I will."
And off he went.
Next time I shall look both ways.

The Farmer's Wife

We used to have about twenty writers and would-be writers on the Creative Writing Course held at Abergavenny; most had not been published, some had, most wanted to be. Except one: a middle-aged lady, "wife of a farmer", she said. She said she had never written anything and was there just to observe and listen. Good, that didn't worry us; if people on the course wanted to write then they could do so, if they didn't want to then fair enough - we, the tutors, didn't push them to do anything except urge them to enjoy their time with us.
We started off with a session where we tutors spoke about our specialities, mine being writing short stories. The farmer's wife sat there listening then and later when other sessions were held. She never spoke, nor took notes, but just listened.
Later I asked her if she was getting anything worthwhile from the course, didn't she want to ask us anything? She said she was thoroughly enjoying herself just listening to us talk.
We were not great talkers, not intellectuals, not academics, not particularly highly successful writers - average standard with some works published. But though the talk was not high-fallooting stuff we did our best to be articulate and, we hoped, helpful to budding writers.
The last day, as usual, everyone on the course read something of theirs - they might have written it that weekend or before, it didn't matter. We did not expect anything from our farmer's wife. But she did have something to read, she said.
And she read a short piece about her young life on a farm.
It was astonishing. Everyone was spellbound. There was applause, which was rare.
We said we hoped we'd see her next time, a few months hence. She said nothing and left.
And we never saw her again.

Hardy

Adam Kirsch, an American poet and critic, wrote: "The Hardys were the kind of people that Jane Austen would never have allowed into her parlour."
I'm not surprised. You don't have to know much about Thomas Hardy to appreciate that remark, you just have to read "At Casterbridge Fair" to understand the sort of feeling Hardy had about old age for example, stabbing to the heart any sentimentality and niceness other people might feel - or think they feel. It's nowhere near Browning's platitudinous kindlyness of "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be."

"These market dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn,
And tissues sere,
Are they the ones we loved in years agone,
And courted here?

Are these the muslined pink young things to whom
We vowed and swore
In nooks on summer Sundays by the Froom,
Or Bidmouth shore?"

Not that Austen was in any way sentimental in her portraying of her characters, it's just that she didn't have the nasty streak of truth that Hardy had.

Music in Westerns

Some of my favourite film music is from Westerns: "The Magnificent Seven", "The Big Country", "Shane", "High Noon". A lot of film music cannot stand on its own - it is used often to underline dramatic moments and that's all it's good for. e.g. I don't like the background music to the film "Strangers on a Train" because of its emphatic underlining of the tension so that I start listening to it irritably rather than watching the action. But the music of "Shane" is glorious in the film without distracting one's attention from the action, and also if played on its own - though one cannot help but visualise the film's great scenes when listening to it.
Some less well known films had some good music in them; there were heaps of films with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers that had wonderful songs but most of which are now forgotten.
One that a piece of writing this week brought to my mind was the song "Tumbling Tumbleweed". That and "Cool Water".
Both were written by a would-be cowboy named Bob Nolan and the first was made famous by Gene Autry. But the definitive recording of it is by a group formed first by Roy Rogers, later with Nolan in charge, The Sons of the Pioneers.
"See them tumbling down
Pledging their love to the ground
Lonely but free I'll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds."
A real, genuine song from The West?
Well it was written by Bob Nolan who had many jobs in his time but ended up singing cowboy songs (mostly his own), but not genuine in the sense that the tumbleweed was a pure American plant. It was brought in by immigrants from the Ukraine but since it grew on flat dry soil, breaking from its roots to be blown around, it became a sort of visual symbol of "The West".
And of course we must not forget all those wonderful songs in John Ford Films (not his Irish ones), my favourite being "I left my love a letter and I put it in a tree, I told her I was off to join the US cavalry," from "The Horse Soldiers".

Prejudice

One of the contestants in "The Apprentice" last night on TV, when asked by Sir Alan Sugar, what he meant on his CV by "I'm a nice Jewish boy", said he was only half-Jewish.
Being only half-Jewish some time back was no excuse to many people in certain organistions like golf clubs and exclusive hotels and so on; it meant exclusion. Cardiff's Golf Club, for example, had a non-Jewish condition on membership. It was, of course, not written in their constitution but put into practice just the same.
It is almost unbelieveable these days that such things went on; maybe they still do.
It brings to mind what Groucho Marx said to a person in charge of a swimming pool in Beverley Hills, when told that he, Marx, being Jewish, could not use the pool; Groucho said: "What about my son, he's only half Jewish so can he go in up to his waist?"
Another story on similar lines was told by Lee Marvin. He and Randolph Scott were out on a drinking spree one evening and ended up at the door of an exclusive club where they were told that they wouldn't be allowed in "because we don't let in Jews or actors."
To which Randolph Scott replied: "Well I'm certainly no Jew, and as far as acting is concerned I ain't no actor either - and I've made 25 films to prove it."
To get a good picture of that period in America you only have to see Elia Kazan's "Gentlemen's Agreement".

Style

I once interviewed Dickie Henderson, comedian and night-club artist. He told me he would have liked to have been Sinatra because the man had great style. Dickie Henderson certainly had style himself but he mocked it in himself. I told him I admired particularly two of his "acts", one in which he played the part of a singer with a microphone with a long lead which an incompetent aide was holding and feeding him with from the side of the stage. It was a very funny sketch. The other was his famous take-off of a man, drunk, sitting on a high stool at a bar singing, Sinatra-style, "One for my baby and one more for the road." Great.
He was then getting on in years and said the first sketch was proving too physically difficult for him; he still did the other - indeed, I saw him do it at Cardiff's New Theatre.
We met in his dressing room half an hour before he was due to go on stage for the evening performance. We chatted and we drank. He had had wheeled in a trolley full from top to bottom with drinks, mostly shorts. We drank gin. Glass after glass of it. He sang a bit of a song and I joined him.
I wrote an article about it but the features editor, for reasons unknown, did not publish it.
Probably because I couldn't remember most of what we had talked about.
When I left, Dickie Henderson walked on stage, and I almost fell out of the theatre.
I was pretty sure he'd been drinking before I met him so, as they say, "he could certainly take it". When he walked on stage to do his show he strolled on with not a stagger in sight.
Style? He had it in spades.

Trash

Someone who has a pseudonym "Eloisa James" used it at first to conceal the fact that, though she was an academic who taught literature, she also wrote historical romance novels under that name. Now, much later, after great success as "Eloisa James" she is no longer ashamed of writing what her colleagues referred to as "trash": she makes a lot of money out of it, which was her original reason for doing it, and now announces to the world that she does it and "is proud of it".
Good for her.
I have known only one writer of such "trash". He was a successful teacher of English in a comprehensive school but was also successful as a writer of "female teenage fiction". Finding he was much more successful doing the latter, he gave up teaching and spent his time writing trash".
Another person who I nearly met, who wrote "trash", was a woman who wrote stories for women's magazines. She taught a class on creative writing which was well attended. When she became ill I was asked if I would take over. I agreed only to find that the students gradually left one by one until I had only a few left. I think they felt sorry for me.
Sometimes I wish I could write the stuff. OK, it's not Thomas Mann but maybe now, if I had had a bash at it, I'd be able to afford the odd cruise. Or two.

Michael Frayn

In retrospect I don't think I should have been a theatre critic, a job I did in Cardiff while teaching full time, for ten years or so. The reason is that there never was much I liked. Even some of the productions that had been raved over in their London productions - raved over by critics and public - I found disappointing. Two in particular.
"Fanshen" a play that I cannot remember much about except that it had something to with the Chinese and was left wing in theme. I saw it when I had a severe cold and, of course, this may have impaired my judgement - but I don't think so. I hated the play.
But whereas this play was a critical success (I don't remember it being a popular one), "Noises Off" was both a critical success and a popular one.
It still is.
Yesterday in the Seven Magazine that comes with The Sunday Telegraph there's a review by Charles Spencer of a new book by Michael Frayn; Spencer mentions "Noises Off" as "His brilliant farce about farce. 'Noises Off' is I think the funniest show I have ever seen...."
I saw a production in Cardiff many years ago. I did not review it, thank God, because I would have been obliged to 'give it a stinker'.
I thought it brilliant in conception, excellent in execution and..... just not funny at all.
Which is why, in retrospect, I think I should not have been a theatre critic.
Incidentally, there were a lot of people (especially actors and directors in Cardiff) who thought the same and, what's more, some of them told me so.

Two writers

I once tried to collaborate with someone in writing a play. I had, what I thought to be, a good plot about an MP ambitious for high office who is found to have been involved in some nefarious activity whilst serving in The Falklands campaign. I wrote the first scene and sent it to my collaborator, a once well known actress. She liked it.... up to a point. The wife of the MP was, she said, not right. An actress would not want to play the part: she was too miserable, she moaned a lot about her life - she was too damned miserable.
I re-wrote it putting in lines my collaborator had suggested but it didn't work.
The play never took off. We abandoned the project.
I recall what the American theatre critic and academic, Eric Bentley, wrote about collaboration between playwrights: "The play by two authors is two plays - and therefore, by the odd arithmetic of the theatre, less than one."

Egmont

Just been to a concert given by The Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera; the first piece they played was a favourite of mine: "Egmont Overture" by Beethoven.
It was one of the first records (a 78) I bought, a famous recording but I cannot recall who performed it.
Then my daughter studied it as part of her GCSE Music examination.
And thirdly I remember it being played in Berlin the day after the ghastly murder of the Jewish Olympic athletes. It seemed a highly suitable piece to play: solemn but majestic, beautiful but sad. The Berlin Philharmonic (I think it was) played it with great feeling; you could sense the players' sympathy in their faces. It was as if they were thinking: this is a tribute to innocent Jewish people who died at the hands of murderous brutes and here is our civilised response to it.

Jack Benny

A great comedian, yes; but actor? Not many people would say he was a good actor. For one thing he was always none other than Jack Benny, whatever name he was given in a film. And he did make a few films I believe, though not any of them(but one) were much good.
The one, of course, was "To Be or Not To Be". It is not so much that he acted well in this film as that he was allowed to be himself in spite of supposedly playing a Polish actor. A Polish actor with a strong American accent.
It didn't matter. No one cared that some - perhaps even most - of the rest of the cast put on semi-Polish accents because with Jack Benny as the actor who wanted to play Hamlet all everyone wanted to see was Jack Benny as himself.
A film director whose name escapes me was asked to name his favourite film and named this one - "To Be or Not To Be". He said: "I defy anyone, ten minutes after seeing the film, to tell someone the plot of the movie." It is the most complicated plot with disguises here and actors playing Nazis there, Polish pilots falling in love with actresses whose husbands are Polish actors.... Never mind, it's a wonderful, immensely funny film.
I wonder, however, if it would work without Jack Benny. I don't think so. It does not depend on the plot for its effect but on what the main character does to bring matters to a head when Hitler himself appears (or seems to).
Questions have been asked about the morality of the film's depiction of Nazis as humorous people, just like they have been asked about the British sit com "Hello Hello." It is tasteless, yes, but as the writer of the sit com said on a discussion: "It's just a bit of fun, that's all."
Pity if someone succeeds in banning it since we'd miss one of the great comic performances on film - Jack Benny as "that great, great actor" (as he describes himself) who wishes to play Hamlet in London and eventually does.

Thomas Mann

My father said to me that I should read "Joseph and his Brothers" by Thomas Mann before I died.
After he finished the novel he found it difficult to settle to read anything else. There was nothing, it seemed, worth reading after it. I think it was the last novel he did read before he died.
The same sort of thing happened to a friend of mine who read the book. He said the same thing - what is there to read now? he asked rhetorically.
The Mann family is being written about again: a new book by Andrea Weiss called "In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain" deals with the relationships between Thomas Mann, his daughter Erika and his son Klaus. Must be worth reading since everything about the family is always worth reading.
I wonder if Thomas Mann would be published today in this commercial publishing set-up that there is now. I can't see anyone publishing "The Magic Mountain" or "Doctor Faustus" and certainly not "Joseph and his Brethren".
I'm glad though that someone once did and will now soon take my father's advice.