Steinbeck

Does anyone read John Steinbeck any more? Well his novel "Of Mice and Men" is being done on some GCSE courses. Good to hear. But what about "The Grapes of Wrath" and "East of Eden"?
I wanted to find out if Sinclair Lewis was still on the shelves of bookshops; all I could find was, probably his most well-known novel, "Main Street". No others. So I looked for books by William Faulkner and found none.
So some of the great works of American literature aren't read these days.
These authors were popular with me and many of my friends when I was a young man. They were quite different in style, tone, storyline, characters than the novels by English writers of the same period. And, of course , some of them made great films. There was the John Ford classic "The Grapes of Wrath" and Lewis Milestone's "Of Mice and Men" which had two charismatic actors in it, Lon Chaney Jr and Burgess Meredith. What a performance Lon Chaney gave as the simple-minded Lennie? More recently John Malkovitch played that role in another film version which is said to be excellent.
I don't think "Main Street" was made into a film but others of Sinclair Lewis's were: "Cass Timberlaine" for one (with Spencer Tracey if memory serves right).
I don't think I'd be able to re-read any of Steinbeck's novels, great as they are, but I can watch the films made of them over and over. I could re-read Sinclair Lewis's novels - all except "Main Street" which is one of those books that you keep reading though at every page you tell yourself "I'm not reading anymore of this boring book". You can't get away from it. Like "Women in Love" and "The Garden of the Finzi Continies" you have to read it to the end although you keep saying you don't want to.

Aquarius

I once went to review a play that left me wondering what it was about. More importantly, what was I going to write about it? I decided to phone the features editor and tell him about my dilemma. I said: "There is simply nothing I can say about this play. It wasn't even dull or boring, it was nothing." "OK," he said, not understanding why I was turning down filthy lucre, "it's their loss."
It wouldn't have been because if I had been impored to fill a small gap in the newspaper the next day, I would have written something so scathing that the group putting the play on would have done one of a few things (a) given up acting (b) shot themselves (c) shot me.
Another show I could not comprehend but had some pleasure in seeing was "Hair". I did review it and remember only a phrase from my review where a young pregnant woman says something like "I got knocked up by a freaked out speed queen." I thought it a nicely delivered phrase, poetic, said a lot in a short sentence; it sort of summed up the show to me: mod rockish, youthful, new, against everything.
But I didn't really get the message of the play. I now do. I think. Here's a passage from one of the songs:
"Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehood or derisions
Golden living, dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberator,
Aquarius!
Aquarius!"
We don't want anything to do with the war in Vietnam, we're off to Canada; we don't want anything to do with any war, we want out of this society that is run by people who make war, we want peace, peace, peace; and we want drugs that make us feel pure spirits.
Something like that.
I'd like to see "Hair" again but the few times it has been revived, it soon died. "Hair" probably died when the flower people stopped celebrating love and peace and "grew up" into cynical adults.
Pity.

Friends

I was asked to write an article on the novelist Gwyn Thomas for The Anglo Welsh Review about thirty years ago; the editor wanted a piece on Gwyn Thomas's plays. I did quite a lot of research, read the plays, about five of them for the stage though he wrote others for TV and radio, and wrote about ten pages. Well, you don't get paid much for articles in literary journals - the reward, you see, is in contributing to such prestigious magazines not the filthy lucre they pay you. So I was pleased to get £5 for the piece, better than nothing I thought, and it might lead to bigger things, invitaions to contribute to other even more prestigious journals.
Not so however. And one day when I was in a bookshop in Cardiff there it was, the edition with my article in it.... in the remaindered section!
Clive James wrote a poem on a book being remaindered: "The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered".

"The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs."

Not bad. But I feel he should have said the book of my friend not my enemy.
Why? Because artists are a bitchy, back-stabbing lot who like nothing better to see their fellow artists skewered, crucified, sacked, remaindered. As a famous Broadway saying goes: "It's not important that I succeed but that my best friend fails."

The Novello Awards

Nick Hemming a guitarist and song writer, virtually unknown until recently when his song was put up to the Ivor Novello Awards, is likely to win over two other songs by more famous groups/people - Elbow and the Last Shadow Puppets.
I wrote a small booklet some years back on the life of Ivor Novello and wondered if there was any interest out there in the great wild pop-loving world in the man himself; so I asked some young people in the local pub and discovered that no one knew who he was, though the barmaid said she had heard of the Ivor Novello awards.
Nick Hemming's attempt at breaking into the big time reflects Ivor Novello's own big break with what was his first song, or one of his early ones. His mother, a famous chorus leader in the early part of the 20th Century told Ivor that she intended to write a patriotic song for the troops at the front in the First World War. She intended to call it "The Flags are a'flying". Ivor was horrified at the thought that she might make an absolute fool of herself so he wrote one himself: "Keep the Home Fires Burning" which became a tremendously successful song, financially for Ivor Novello as well as for John McCormick, the famous Irish tenor who recorded it and made, he himself said, £20 000, a goodly sum in those days.
Let's hope Nick Hemming, an unassuming young man who has no great ambitions to be famous but no doubt would welcome some "ready", is similarly successful with his song: "The Last of the Melting Snow".
Good title.

I'm on a Train

A couple of years ago I wrote a one act play for a man (in his early 40's): he is on a train and is using his mobile phone to contact various people: his assistant in his nearly bankrupt firm, his wife, his daughter, his wife's psychiatrist etc. It'a a zany, mix-up play, a comedy, ideal for performance at The Edinburgh Festival (he's on his way to that city). Well, though no one has desired to take it to the Festival yet, about twelve men have contacted me about the play.
One in particular lives in Mauritius. He is an actor; he likes the play a lot and thinks he might do it. And he wishes to translate it into his island's main language, Creole. I said "Go ahead, that's fine with me."
I don't know if it will work in Creole but I don't see why not; the only problem with playing it in Mauritius though is that, he tells me, there are no trains there. So he has decided to set it on a bus. Very good. So my play "I'm on a Train" becomes "I'm on a Bus".
Brilliant.

Pigeons

I read recently that pigeons are flying too low to make shooting them much fun: there's no skill or joy in shooting a pigeon that is there, easy to kill. Which reminds me of a friend of mine who once hired a harpoon gun for underwater shooting; he dived into the sea and shot a fish which was there just staring at him. He felt so guilty and sorry for the fish that he never shot another.
Why don't these bird shooters train their guns on magpies instead then which, it is argued by one nature society, are a menace to small birds? Because they are protected, that's why.
I wonder if farmers obey these laws that protect these birds. Farmers I have known, and my second cousin was a farmer, have never hestitated to shoot crows, magpies and jays because they damage crops. They also have made a practice of shooting pigeons, wild pigeons I hasten to add. Not because they damage crops (though probably they do) but because they are nice to eat.
My father and I visited my second cousin farmer when I was a child. He had that morning shot a bunch (not sure about that being the collective noun) of wild pigeons. "There they were on a branch," he said. "About eight of them. Got out the old blunderbuss (a gun that shot a heap of lead shot in a beam of bullets) and let fly." And there they were on the table, cleaned and cooked.
It is the only time I have ever eaten pigeon with its dark brown and white meat but I can report that the meat was absolutely delicious, though you had to watch you didn't swallow the lead shot in them.
Maybe magpies would taste good too.

Deception

The film "Deception" which I saw last night and sort of enjoyed, though there were heaps of loose ends and an ending that left one feeling rather sick and weary and saying to oneself "why have I wasted nearly an hour over that?" Yet I didn't turn it off (video) as I do with most "Wire"'s (because I can't understand what the characters are saying - especially the black ones who should have, like "Airplane" or whatever it was called, had sub titles for two black men on the plane), nor did I rant and rave about it being biased politically (as most George Clooney "serious" films are)..... no, I watched it and felt it was stylish - much more than most TV plays made in Britain.
The stylishness of it had to do with the two performances by Ewan Mcregor and Somebody Else and with some snappy dialogue (which one critic called corny) and with a smooth-like filmic technique. So, a bit like one of the late Woody Allen films, thrillers (which by the way makes me realise that Mcregor was in one of Woody's films recently) but not as good - and you know what critics said of "Match Point" (which I thought excellent) and "cassandra's Crossing" which I thought even better.
Looking up Rotten Tomatoes which has reviews of all films from the world over, I could find only one review which had something good to say about "Deception". It's better than their 12% valuation of it I think.
O yes, there is mention of a good review of the film on the cover of the DVD: fantastic etc. written by the film critic of The Daily Star.
That may say something.

The Third Man

It's about sixty years since "The Third Man" film was made; O yes, I remember it well. It used to be one of my favourite films. But something happened that made me not wish to see it again, and that something was that I got fed up with the musical soundtrack. All those years ago the sound of the zither seemed apt for the setting of the film - Vienna after WW2; it gave an authentic taste to the place. Now, however, it grates on my nerves. I suppose I could watch the film with sound turned off and subtitles turned on but then, of course, I'd miss the voices of such wonderful actors as Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles.
What a scene that is in the Prater Wheel where Harry Lime looks down at the little ants of people and reflects on how insignificant they are; and then this: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
I'm not sure if that argument holds. Was the birth and artistic development of Michelangelo directly affected by war, terror, murder and bloodshed? Mmm!
I heard once that Graham Greene who wrote the script of the film did not actually write the above lines, that they were written by Orson Welles himself.
Welles said, later, when the film appeared: "the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks."
I was glad to hear that the film made the zither player famous after being a mere cafe entertainer; but the music still makes my teeth grate.

Magpies

Ted Hughes's daughter was writing in a supplement about a pet magpie she had. Hold on, I thought, a magpie that was a pet! I don't think the magpies that nest in the trees at the bottom of our garden would make very good pets. They are the most vicious of birds. There used to be scores of thrushes there in the bushes underneath the trees, now there are none. And, on the same topic of how magpies drive other smaller birds away (or kill them off), I used to go frequently to an adult education college where there were, about 20 years ago, thousands of twittering small birds - now there are hardly any. No dawn chorus, just the chattering of magpies.
But I do have a certain admiration for magpies; like cats they seem to "walk alone", live their own lives regardless of others, don't give a damn for any other creatures.
They seem fearless. At the bottom of our garden about 15 years back there were some wild cats. Even the woman who lives next door would not go near them and she is a cat lover whom cats take to always. Not these; they lived their own lives breeding kittens galore.
One day I saw one of these wild cats stalk a magpie. It shuffled up near the magpie and the magpie acted as if it hadn't seen him (her, rather, the cat was a tortoisehell and they are always female); but the magpie had seen her for it suddenly opened its wings and fluttered them aggressively. Then it strutted about a while boastfully I felt. The cat shuffled away slowly until the magpie chased after her making her bolt for cover among the bushes with her family.
The Hughes daughter's magpie wasn't with her for long; and when it left, it never came back.

Amateurs

When I once suggested that there were some amateur actors who were as good, if not better, than some professionals I was verbally assaulted by a representative of Equity, the actors' union: I was told I was speaking through my you know what.
In my reviewing days I often found that there were some good amateurs who I thought might have made the grade as professionals, but why should they? Why would they want to try? After all, many of them held down good jobs: some were lawyers, some teachers, all professional people - why would they want to give up their lucrative professions for the rat race that is acting with the numbers out of work at any one time being about 80%.
One of the worst features of amateur productions I found were the sets. They were indeed amateurish. And, for musicals, the choreography - always amateurish however much they practiced.
Many directors of films, however, have used amateurs and often the results are successful. It's not just the novelty factor but the fact that they often play themselves. The main character in Vittorio de Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" was a manual worker and the boy who brilliantly played his son was his real life son.
The great Indian director, Satyajit Ray, learned from such films as "Bicycle Thieves" before he began film-making hiimself with his Apu trilogy. He too used amateur actors.
When you see his films, as well as de Sica's, you wonder why films aren't made like them any more. Perhaps it's because there are no people like them in the film industry any more, men of integrity and vision.

Book Signings

Andrew Davies, the TV writer, tells of how, meeting Kingsley Amis at a book signing, he said he was a great fan of Amis's but thought his latest book was not as good as a previous one. Amis replied: "Why, thank you very much. And what on earth makes you think I'm interested in the opinion of young shags like you? Bugger off now and a very good afternoon to you."
The first book I read by Kingsley Amis was his second which I found much more amusing than "Lucky Jim". Maybe "Lucky Jim" was more in keeping with the "angry young man" image that a lot of writers then assumed. Like a lot of artists his later works lacked something of the vivacity of those early ones; maybe, like a lot of writers who feel they wish to be taken seriously by critics, he strived to express something deep and failed because he had nothing deep to say. He started off "on the left" and later became a Thatcherite; then when that happened he had nothing to say except to be acidly critical of all he had stood for before. He became a thorn in the side of progressives or pseudo-progressives. And I'm afraid he became a rather comic figure as a result.
I don't know if he had a lot of people wanting him to sign a copy of his book; I hope he was not like two other "authors", or rather, autobiographers I saw in a Cardiff booksjhop who had no people interested in their books: Will Carling was one of them which was understandable since he was hated by Welsh rugby supporters; the other was Peter Barkworth whom I felt sorry for. I felt like going over to him to say how much I liked his acting.... but then I'd have felt obliged to buy his book!

Hake

Simon Hoggart, writing his column on TV in The Spectator, said that rather than eat something that those "wonderful" chefs had concocted, he'd settle for sausage and chips.
I agree. Some of these fancy chefs seem to be more concerned with elegant presentation than taste, as if they are producing works of art.
I like plain food. I think there are good sauces but there are few chefs who can produce them. I recall Bernard Levin, in a series of radio broadcasts on his favourite Euroopean restaurants, mentioning that just after he'd finished a coarse the waiter went to take his plate away; "No," said Levin. "Bread please for the remaining sauce." But in many cases the sauces are so strong that the real flavour of the fresh food is suppressed - my father always maintained that curry was used in India to cover up the smell of rotting meat.
Today I bought some hake and it was delicious. No sauce, just fried hake and chips (and not your oven-ready kind which are often reconstituted potatoes formed into chip-like shapes). And how much did it cost for two of us? £3.35.
In Ashton's fish stall in Cardiff's market they sell hake in three forms: fillets, cutlets and whole young hake. The fillets and cutlets are about £20 per kg whereas the whole hake is about £5 per kg. The whole hake is filleted, topped and tailed by the fishmonger so there's nothing to be done when at home except cook it.
So why do people buy the dear fish instead of what I buy, the whole hake? No doubt they must feel that work would have to be done on the whole fish: it's simpler to buy one or two cutlets.... Crazy.
As for sausage and mash, one has to be particular in choosing the best sausages - or, rather, those one likes most. Not continental ones of course. When Graham Greene was asked what he missed most about England he replied "sausages".

Plots

Someone was comparing the film "The Sting" with "Deception" and concluding that Hollywood can't make films with complex plots satisfactorilly any more. Don't know why; it's just that they are unable to or don't want to; maybe they thought that the star quality of Julia Roberts would carry the film at the box office and didn't bother to attend sufficiently well to the twists and turns of the story.
Some films with very complicated plots have done well not only with critics but at the box office too. About "The Maltese Falcon" it is said that it would take as long to explain the details of the plot as to see the film. As for "To Be Or Not To Be" with Jack Benny, a certain film director said of it: "I defy anyone to tell you the plot ten minutes after seeing the film".
"The Usual Suspects" is a film that is so complex that it needs to be seen a couple of times to get what the story is telling. I saw it once and thoroughly enjoyed it but didn't follow the twists and turns; yet I had the gut feeling that the people who wrote it and produced it did know. So I saw it again and thought "I get it" - but I wasn't sure. The third viewing I did get it. Was it worth the trouble? Yes it was.
Maybe it's like that feeling you get when listening to some, to you, new piece of music: you think "I don't really know if I like this or not but it's interesting enough to try it a second time". The late quartets of Beethoven. The late sonatas of Beethoven. "Parsifal". Richard Srauss's Alpine Symphony. Berg's Violin Concerto.