Schubert

I recall Bernard Levin writing about Schubert and saying that he never wrote a bad note and that he was the kindest and most considerate man. I also recall Bernard Shaw referring to his "chocolate box" music.
I have just heard Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor and cannot agree with Shaw because the music is so powerful but neither can I entirely agree with Levin because I feel that once the fierce introductory chords are played there follows a real let down of a theme, so banal compared with what has just gone.
It's a great introduction, used by Woody Allen in his best film "Crimes and Misdemeanours" at the moment when the woman who is the main character's lover is striding to her death.
Yes, the quartet has a title and it is "Death and the Maiden" - certainly apt but I wonder if Woody used it there because he felt it was most effective or because the title made it apt - to those in the know!
Even those not "in the know" do know that Schubert wrote an Unfinished Symphony, his 8th., the one with only two movements. Which reminds me of my once favourite advert on TV. Schubert is in the local pub enjoying a drink when in comes a young man who says "Herr Schubert, what about your Unfinished Symphony?" To which Schubert replies, holding his glass of beer aloft "Yes, but what about my unfinished Kronenberg!"
Great advert. Great symphony. Great Quartet - all except that bit that follows the introduction.

Woody Allan

I used to know a playwright who could write wonderful, witty, sharp and funny dialogue with stories that had a beginning, middle and end - conventional stuff. He got a boost from working for a while for the BBC where he may have had a couple of TV plays done but I never heard that he did; but then he was dropped. They tried to turn him into a serious playwright who had something to say. The trouble was he didn't have anything to say.
I think of him when I see a film by Woody Allen. His films are always well made, have terrific pace; the acting is always superb and the stories are interesting, but.... well, has he anything to say?
Perhaps he doesn't want to say anything about the human condition but I feel that deep down he does. The trouble is he doesn't know what.
I think one of his problems with this "having to say something" is that he was weaned on scriptwriting in a department which depended on the script writers coming up with funny lines. If the plot is taking him one way and there's a good joke another way, he'll go the way of the joke.
I have just seen "Cassandra's Dream" and while watching it wondered why the critics had been so cruel in their panning of it; I thought it well made, well acted, had tremendous drive and pace; but afterwards I wondered what exactly it had to say. What was the point of a serious artist making it? If he is.
His masterpiece, "Crimes and Misdemeanours" was a great achievement with a central performance that was superb - should have won him an oscar. But what was it about? Both that film and "Match Point" and, to a certain extent, "Cassandra's Dream" had to do with getting away with murder and being able to live with a clear conscience afterwards. That said, it's a pretty nihilistic idea, hardly an ethical one.

Principals

I once worked in a college where a head of department, doing extra evening work as overtime, used to sign his five daughters up for his course in order to get the required number for the course to start, then, after a few weeks, they'd drop out one by one, by which time he was officially able to continue the course (and so get paid!).
I told this true story to a philosopher lecturer when I was in his extra mural class. He looked a little dubious. "It's true," I said. "And later on the man became a principal of a college." "Hah!" he said, "that I can understand."
Probably the reason for that was that the philosopher's college had a principal who was known to be crafty if not actually a crook. I met him a couple of times and got on well with him. He told me how, when the students were rioting over something he had done - can't recall what - he had had to climb through the window of his office to retrieve some very incriminating papers which he then destroyed.
The man was depised if not hated. Why did I quite like him? I don't know. He was a character, I think that's the reason. So was his wife. Talk about a drunken wench! She'd appear at theatrical events in the college absolutely plastered, hardly able to walk, and grinning if not actually laughing aloud at.... we never knew what.
Are all principals like that - crooked? Perhaps it goes with the job.

Burns day

So let's celebrate Robbie Burns day with a poem of his and one of mine:

His:
"O my luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly played in tune."

Mine:
"Who was it said that love is like a red, red rose?
More like a thistle is what it's like at first,
Then after prickly overtures, aiming to quench love's thirst,
A set back - while she likes your style, she doesn't like your nose

Or if it's not your nose then another nauseous thing
About you: your teeth or hair or the way you drink your soup....
It doesn't matter what, the cause is hopeless, your coup
D'etat to win her heart is a battle lost - to her t'was just a little fling."

Hunter

"Hunter" was a better than average "TV cop show"; most crits I have read of it showered it with compliments - fast moving, well acted, realistic etc. The one aspect no critic drew attention to was the nastiness of the story. Two children were abducted by anti-abortion zealots and their death was threatened if the TV news programmes that night did not broadcast a film showing an abortion.
It's a strong story and a rivetting one since not only was it well acted but it was intelligently and craftilly written.
But the use of children in drama is something that should be deliberated on, surely, for a good deal of time; and I wonder if it was. Or was the storyline so strong that it was decided that that took preference over the moral rectitude of using children's possible deaths as drama. Of course it might have been assumed by the play's nakers that the issue was one that should be faced by the public.
The trouble is that issues are not things people ponder much over if presented as drama - it's the dramatic excitement of the story that is prominent.
I recall that Hitchcock was asked about what he would not put in a film of his and he replied something to effect that he would not use children's sufferings or death to enhance the suspense. He had used it once in "Spellbound" and I had the feeling that he wished he hadn't.
He never did again.

Directors

In Tim Walker's review of "Oliver" in Sunday's Telegraph he writes: "Part of the problem is that it has simply been choreographed to death." The director of this greatly anticipated production is Rupert Goold and I am not at surprised to read that he had "choreographed it to death" having seen his "Macbeth" at Chichester a couple of years ago, the one that thrilled many critics and audiences not least because it starred Patrick Stewart in the title role. I may be the only person who saw that production who hated it. And it was my belief that Goold had choreographed that one to death.
Tim Walker writes on "Oliver" that "From Rowan Atkinson downwards every member of the cast seems to be placing his or her feet in precisely the right points on the stage - to the miilimetre - at every microsecond."
I too had the impression that the cast of "Macbeth" were over-directed so that they were sometimes like robots following orders. One of the most unbearably moving scenes in "Macbeth" is when one of the characters (Macduff?) is informed that his wife and children have been murdered. In the Chichester production it was as if he had been informed that the tax inspector was about to come and look at his bank statement.
I have the feeling that Rupert Goold is determined to make a name for himself by stamping on productions his own personality, and this I'm afraid, usually is at the expense of the work.
I don't think directors in my young days were quite so imposing and dictatorial as they are now; even when visiting the cinema we went not because Ford had directed a film but because it starred John Wayne. Though we know now how great a force Ford was he usually remained someone in the background. When asked about his art he said "I just make Westerns."

Poe

The 19th. January, this coming Monday, is the 200th. anniversary of the birth of Edgar Alan Poe. I have read some of his gory stories but fail to finish some like "Ligeia". I find his style awkward sometimes. And I often feel he should discard some of his ponderous explanations to give the story more pace.
I was telling a friend some years ago that I had, in my youth, heard a programme on the radio called "The Brains Trust" in which "the brains" (two of whom I recall as Professor Joad and Julian Huxley, the zoo-ologist) were asked what they considered to be the best short story ever written; I think two or maybe three said "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Alan Poe. My friend said he would get the story and read it. When he did he told me he was not at all impressed. Which surprised me because it is a very good short story, maybe not a favourite of mine but a real nasty thriller.
It begins: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge."
I was at one time intrigued to know what precisely those "injuries" and the "insult" were; we are never told. This gave me an idea: I would write a prequel to the story ending with Fortunato saying to a friend "I can't come with you I'm afraid, I've been invited to a friend's place where he has, he says, a cask of Amontillado......."
But perhaps one of the intrigueing things about the story is the narrator's reluctance to divulge the reason he has for murdering the hapless Fortunato; maybe, like Iago, the reason for his evil actions are never given because there weren't any except a bitter dislike of Othello.
In a later edition of "The Brains Trust" they were asked the same question: what is the greatest short story ever written and the answer - different panel no doubt -was quite different: Kipling's "The Man Born to be King", which I have never liked.

Free Verse

Dana Gioia writes: "Like subsidised farming that grows food that no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers not the consumers." He goes on: "To regain poetry's readership one must begin by meeting William Carlos Williams' challenge to find 'what concerns many men not simply what concerns poets'."

I have just come across a short poem by William Carlos Williams; I'm not sure if this is his attempt to concern many men:

"I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold."

Here's one to Babe (Oliver Hardy) who was born on 18 January 1892.

"Fat as a porker
But delicately footed
Babe drew you like a magician
To his style of comedy."

Oscar Winner

A friend of mine (I shall call him GP) who I sometimes met in Cardiff was a sporadic friend: someone who I'd meet one day and be greeted with a warm hand shake and a "Good to see you, come and have a drink" only to meet another day and be met with a grin of recognition and nothing said. Odd bloke was GP.
One day about twenty years ago I bumped into him outside The Model Inn and it was one of his good days - "Good to see you, come and have a drink."
So into the Model Inn we went to have a few pints and a chat.
"That broadcast you did about my stag party," he said, laughing, "that was great stuff."
I was pleased he liked it because it had been quite a scathing sort of piece about the drunkeness and general rampageousness of the party where the place in which it was held was nearly trashed (rugby players most of the party). It had been broadcast as an item in, of all things, "Woman's Hour" and it been followed by a discussion about such parties by prominent rugby players and ex-players like Cliff Morgan.
"Why don't you do more of that sort of thing - broadcasting and writing and stuff?"
I was about to answer him - to the effect that I wasn't asked to most of the time - when he jumped up and said: "This chap might help you, my uncle over there at the bar: he won an Oscar."
I said: "Huh!"
"Come over and meet him."
So I did. And indeed he had won an Oscar. Can't recall his name but he was a documentary film maker and had won his Oscar with a documentary about Dylan Thomas, one of those poetic kinds of docs. where you see the waves rolling onto the beach and a voice reads one of DT's poems - you know the sort of thing, usually boring.
But not in this case.
"What are you doing now?" I asked him.
"Preparing to make film with T.P.NcKenna," he said.
Now I have seen T.P.McKenna in a few TV plays but never in a film until a couple of days ago when I saw, for the first time, "Straw Dogs". He didn't have a big part but he made a lot of the part he had, a judge in a Cornish village full of brutish thugs. He had a tremendous air of authority about him.
I wonder if GP's uncle ever made that film. I could have done him a good script but the subject of my writing never came up; everybody wanted to talk rugby.
Never saw GP again. Heard he died. Everyone said probably of drink but I don't believe it.
In my mind's eye I still see him greeting me with a warm handshake and "Good to see you, come and have a drink", not the other character who'd pass me by with a grin of recognition.

Anton Dolin

Anton Dolin was a famous dancer in his time: when Diaghilev was at large in Paris producing such new works as "The Rite of Spring" and "Punchinella". In the fifties Dolin brought a troupe to Cardiff to perform a few ballets one of which was Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade". I myself appeared in this.
No, not as a dancer but as an extra. A notice went up on the walls of the common room in the university asking for extras for the ballet company called "The London Festival Ballet". A few of us applied and were accepted; we appeared as soldiers in the Rimsky-Korsakov work. We didn't have to dance but to rush on as soldiers of the Shah and cut to pieces his wives who had, in his absence, been cavorting with the male prisoners having let them out of their cells. We painted our faces with long moustaches and gave our eyes fiercesome looks and charged on at the appropriate time.
We were paid two and sixpence per night.
One of our crowd was a rather good looking young man who took the eye of Anton Dolin, now not a dancer himself but director of this London Festival Company. "I have a sore knee," he said to our young soldier, "would you be so good as to come to my dressing room to massage it for me?"
I'm pretty sure he didn't go.
I have just read in "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross that Diaghilev was taken with the then "beautiful" young Anton Dolin who was a dancer in his company.
He wasn't very beautiful in the 1950's.

What would I have done?

David Aaronovitich in an article in The Times today writes about how maybe we shouldn't make judgements on people who have behaved in a way that, now, we might condemn. He points to a film called "The Reader" in which the character played by Kate Winslet is brought to trial for Nazi crimes and when asked why she did a certain vile act she replied "What would you have done?"
About 20 years ago this thought came to me when I was in the pub one night: I looked at some of the men there of a certain age who might have been alive during the 2nd World War and I wondered what they might have done if this country had been under Nazi occupation.
I wrote a poem on the subject called IF THE GERMANS HAD COME TO WALES :

If the Germans had come to Wales
Would Tom and Mel and Bert and Dave have been collaborators?
Would Tom have stayed in local government
And helped with transportation of the Jews?
Would dear old Mel, ex training officer,
Have lectured on indocrination of the young?
Would Bert, smart Bert, who once (he said)
Had walked to John O'Groats - would he
Have walked behind them to the trains?
Would Dave, who's full of fun and jokes and puns,
Would Dave have closed the door on them?

Would I have helped?
Would I have given talks?
Would I have walked behind them to the trains?
Would I have closed the door?

Sometimes I feel the guilt of knowing what I would have done
If we had lost the war and Germany had won.

Con Artists

In the last blog I wrote I mentioned a few films by Orson Welles; I forgot to mention one of my favourites of his, not fictional but a documentary (sort of). "F for Fake", says a review, "is about the nature of reality, celebrity and art." I'm not so sure about that. Welles always gives the impression that he is deeply serious about things when he is talking, being himself, not acting, but I wonder if, as in this film, he has anything profound to say about "the nature of reality, celebrity and art"; nonetheless it is an entertaining work with characters in it who are less than real in that they may be role-playing, certainly celebrities in a criminal way and not so much artists as con artists.
One is Clifford Irving whose fame rests on a fake biography of Howard Hughes, the film producer (and flyer). Another is Elmyr de Hory, a forger of famous artists's paintings - though he never copied other painters' works but invented works in their style. And sold them, through agents, for lots of money (his agents, naturally, pocketing the most).
They are an engaging pair of rogues. Why is it that rogues are usually more interesting than ordinary people? Can't answer that but I do believe that there is a general fascination with rogues such as these who can pull fast ones on establishment figures who set themselves up to experts.
One of the most amusing features of this film is the fact that most of the information that was obtained about Elmyr de Hory came from a biography by none other than Clifford Irving. Elmyr de Hory was a living person alright; I know that because he was in the film..... Mmmm! What can you believe? Was he real? Or was Orson Welles pulling a fast one on us?
On the subject of forged paintings it was said that Cezanne painted about 120 works, 200 of which are in the USA.

Marlon Brando

There's a new biography of Brando just published; the review inThe New York Times quotes Brando himself on his art - "It's a bum's life."
His best work was done early culminating in "On the Waterfront", then there were ten years of duds (making enough money to pay his shrinks), then a magnificent comeback in "The Godfather".
"Why do great ones," mourns the reviewer, "so rarely have the capacity to handle their genius? Brando is not the first talent to invite the question - his contemporary Orson Welles preceeded him on the path of brilliant promise, wobbly mature work and self-sabotaging obesity."
Orson Welles never surpassed "Citizen Kane" in brilliance of filming technique; but it is a difficult film to like: it's as if the techniques overshadow the story so that you never get involved, there is no "willing suspension of disbelief."
I wonder if Orson Welles, achieving so much in the art of film-making in this, his first film, didn't have anything further to contribute in later work - he'd done it all. Yet there are some good films of his one of which is on TV tonight - "The Stranger". This is a thriller with a simple conception: an investigator is on the trail of a Nazi war criminal who has ingratiated himself into a small university town and is about to marry a young woman who believes him to be an all-American guy. It's fast moving, it has strong performances from Edward G. Robinson and Welles himself (the Nazi of course) , and it has brilliant touches in the script which, you feel, must be contributions from Welles (e.g. the paper chase scene). And you do get involved in the story with an end that is exciting and wonderfully staged.
I like this film more than most of Welles's. I like "On the Waterfront" better than most others of Brando's.
They'll both be remembered for their greatest work but, like "The Stranger", some of the lesser stuff is worth a look at too.

Robert Burns

I've been singing Robbie Burns's "Auld Lang Syne" all my life at various times - the New Year usually - and suddenly realised I didn't know what it meant. What, for example, is the meaning of "Should auld aquaintance be forgot/ And never brought to mind?/ Should auld aquaintance be forgot/ For old lang syne?" Well, they are questions: should we forget old friends and the good old days? No, he answers in the chorus: "For auld lang syne my dear/ For auld lang syne/ We'll take a cup of comfort yet/ For auld lang syne." That is: we'll remember the good old days and have a drink together to celebrate them.
I think. One can never be sure with Burns. His poems can be interpreted in many ways.
My grandfather, at weddings and such celebrations, never failed to get to his feet to make a speech and he always had an appropriate quote up his sleeve from Robbie Burns to emphasise a point he was making or a sentiment he was expressing. The trouble was that no one ever knew what it was he was saying because he always recited the words in what seemed like an impenetrable broad Scottish accent. The fact that he wasn't Scottish but of Irish stock (with maybe a touch of gypsy in there somewhere) didn't worry him or anyone else; it was the feeling the recitation of the poem inspired in the gathered host that impressed.
January 25th is Burns Night, not just in Scotland but all over the world where there are Burns societies or social gatherings of people of Scottish descent (and other hangers-on who like a tipple). What a night that is going to be this year, the year that is the 250th anniversary of his birth!