H.G.Wells

There was a story of H.G.Wells's that I read many years ago which I recall enjoying tremendously; the trouble was I couldn't remember the title so was unable, until yesterday, to find it in the collected stories. Now at last I have found it and read it again and it's still superb. All I did was put up on Google "H.G.Wells - short stories" and up came a list of his stories and, by clicking on a title, I was able to read the whole story. The wonders of modern science! The wonders of the internet!
The story is called "Mr Brisher's Treasure". It tells - or rather Brisher himself tells - how he was engaged to a young woman whose father did not like or approve of him..... But read it for yourself. Wonderful story, very amusing, superb ironic end.
I recall Malcolm Muggeridge saying that he did not like Wells. I wondered at the time if it had to do with Wells the man or his works. Probably both. Muggeridge could take against a lot of other writers: Zola he hated, Chandler he made fun of. Yet he seemed a decent type. When he interviewed Brendan Behan on television he was the soul of tact and decency. There he was, unruffled by Behan's drunken behaviour, insisting on asking him questions about his art while Behan did his best to answer him but struggled against the booziness of his brain. Afterwards I recall Behan referring to Muggeridge as "the only English gentleman I have ever met".
I do wish I knew why Muggeridge did not like Wells: did it have something to do with Wels's aetheism? Or his style of writing? Or his womanising? What I wonder? He never gave a reason to my knowledge.
I have not read many of Wells's novels but his short stories I think are marvellous.

Wozzeck

Off on Sunday afternoon to see Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" by The Welsh National Opera Company. What am I going to make of it? Will it be too avante garde for me? To refer to something as avante garde is I suppose to refer to art that is ahead of its time now. Now, not back then in the 1920's when Berg wrote the opera. Yet his music, together with that of Schoenberg and Webern, is still difficult, is still unassimilated into the musical nerves of your average modern music lover. There are people who like this twelve tone scale music but they, I guess, are few and far between. Just as modern poetry is enjoyed by an ever diminishing group of people - mainly other poets - it seems to be that music by these three German composers is written to be heard by an elite, and that elite are other composers who work in the same genre. So the ordinary music lover like me, trying as best he can to enter this seemingly sealed world, finds it difficult to get to grips with it. It's rather like, I think, trying to engage in Calculus without the basic knowledge of mathematics to help: like trying to read a foreign language without a dictionary to hand.
One thing struck me about the story of Wozzeck: none of the characters are what you would expect to find in romantic opera. While the subject is tragic the plot does not follow the course of most tragedies where the central character is a man of high regard brought down by flaws in his character or illness or social conditions. It is not a Don Carlos or a Madame Butterfly or a Boheme; it's more in line with the drama of German Expressionism. The central character is someone who is low to start with; he can't get much lower except by doing something horrid.
In The Spectator last week Lloyd Evans, the theatre critic, wrote complimentarilly of Horvath's play from the 20's or 30's, "Judgement Day", but he said: "I admired it a lot. I just didn't like it much. Simple reason. The characters are all ghastly people". I have the feeling that that's how I will respond to Alban Berg's "Wozzeck".
We shall see.

Plum

I don't get it, I just don't get it: this adulation from well known people, some of them well known writers (like Evelyn Waugh no less), for P.G.Wodehouse. I have never been able to read more than a few pages of any of his books; I don't find the main characters very interesting, rather tiresome I think are Jeeves and Wooster, and the subsidiary characters are , well, "characters", cardboard cut-outs of English upper class toffs.
Rupert Christianson, writing in The Telegraph about a year ago about Alan Bennett's play "The History Boys" (by the way, am I the only person in the world who thought it pedestrain?) mentioned certain artists he did not much like: Wodehouse was amoung them; John Gielgud another; and Bruckner. I was glad to see Woodhouse there but not too pleased to see Gielgud by his side, so to speak. As for Bruckner, well he's an acquired taste - one I have not quite acquired yet but, like the parson's egg, I feel he's good in parts.
Yet, though I can't read P.G.Woodhouse (whom his admirers call "Plum" for some reason I don't know and really don't wish to know), I still like to hear about him: the way he lived, his success at writing lyrics for musicals, his so-called collaboration with the Germans in WW2 and so on; and I have to say that I have enjoyed the radio plays that were done a couple of years ago, don't know why but they made me smile.
I know only one of his songs, the one from "Showboat": "Along Came Bill". I read somewhere that he had written it originally for another of Jerome Kern's shows but Kern hadn't used it; now when he decided to use it, Oscar Hammerstein who was writing the book and lyrics for "Showboat" objected to its inclusion.
Well I'm glad Kern won the argument because it's a marvellous song. Actually, though, it is, as Hammerstein probably saw, it is completely out of place there.

Recipes

I am often amazed to see recipes that are recommended by well known chefs for the ordinary bloke, like me, to try are almost impossible to follow. There was a recipe for "real" curry which had about fifty items on it most of which I do not have on the shelf; I know someone who tried to do it and failed - she ended up serving her guests with a well known bottle version straight from Sainsbury's shelves.
Then there are recipes that look complicated but, when you take the trivial items away from them, are really quite simple. By "the trivial items" I mean a bit of this and a bit of that - leaves mostly chopped for artistic effect. One this week in a colour mag by a "famous chef" boiled down to (if I may) grilled steak with trimmings i.e. trivial items.
I was surprised on reading one of Keith Floyd's menus for roast lamb that it had garlic in it and rosemary. Who wants garlic with roast lamb for God's sake? And surely mint sauce is better than rosemary. And why cook it in red wine?
It seems to me that a lot of the stuff that is added these days are so powerful that they often suppress the real taste of the main constituent. Floyd covered his bream with white wine sauce! Isn't the fish good enough on its own?
I liked a fishmonger on Nigel Whatshisname's show who held up a mackeral and said how beautiful it was and all you needed to do to it was fry it or grill it and eat it as it was, no trimmings, with a hunk of bread.
Today I had a roast lamb with mint sauce (from the garden - the bottle stuff is not good), boiled potatoes, carrots, parsnips and French beans, followed by a plain rice pudding (not from a tin). All helped down with a few glasses of red wine. Angel's food.

Chairs

P. J. O'Rourke was looking at a folding chair and he read a tag on it which said: "do not attempt to lift the front end of the chair while sitting down on it". He thought that this spelled out what was wrong with America but I won't go into that because (a) I didn't really follow it and (b) I know what's wrong with America already and it's not what O'Rourke thinks. I'm more interested in Chairs. Folding chairs can be a menace; I once as a child caught a finger in one that collapsed under me and I can feel the pain now. Maybe they're safer now than then but I am not one to test that out - I never now sit in deck-chairs.
The topic of chairs came up today when my wife and I were dining in a very good restaurant in Cardiff called "The Brasserie". She remarked on how comfortable the chairs were: soft, seemed to fit cosily into the curves of your back, upright so that you could get close to the table and so on. How many times have I suffered with restaurant chairs, with hard seats and knobbly backs with bits sticking into my spine. Chapter Arts Centre is a case in point of a chairs perhaps satisfying an artistic idea of what a seat should be to look at while being almost impossibnle to sit on.
The test of a chair is how it feels when you sit on it not how it looks. Van Goch's yellow chair looks good I suppose but it also looks most uncomforetable.

Groups

One of my favourite films is "Shane" which I saw, again, a few weeks ago. I knew there was a novel from which the film had been made so I ordered it through Amazon and am now reading it. I have just read the part where Shane and Starrett get to work on a large stump of a tree. In the film it takes minutes but, with cuts and characteristic George Stevens's slow fade cuts, the impression is that it takes hours; in the book it takes about six pages. Both forms are well done, showing how the two unlike men, one a gunfighter (or former one), the other a rough-hewn farmer, sort of bond.
This bonding of people in groups was discussed in an article in The Times recently: someone has produced a theory that when people get together they usually have the same interests but that these interests, by virtue of the bonding, become more striking; if they are political interests they become more intense and sometimes fanatical. The two men in "Shane" have a common purpose and by doing it together they become over-earnest, dedicated to the task, almost fanatical. They are not going to let that stump of a tree beat them. They are not going to get the team of horses out to help them. They are going to do it together even if it kills them.
I had an experience a long time ago of this group mania. I was taking part in a student protest march against something - can't think what. Someone said "look at that sign over there in that garden - let's get it down." And, for some inconceiveable reason, the urge to do just that swept over our group of about six young men and we went over there, pushed and shoved it (as if it was a tree stump?), wrestled with it until it came out of the ground and then we joyfully threw it down. We returned to the march feeling we had achieved something.
We hadn't, of course, acheived anything; we had destroyed something. I don't know what was written on the sign - probably "house for sale" or something. I probably didn't even know at the time. It didn't matter. What mattered was that someone had set in motion an atavistic urge to become a pack who acted as one because.... I suppose because the group wanted it done.
"Me Lud, it wasn't me, it was the group."
Turn to "A Tale of Two Cities" by Dickens to learn more about crowd behaviour, or to Zola's "Germinal".
Looking back it seems so crazy, but at the time it seemed to be the obvious thing to do: pull that sign up and dash it to the ground.

George Sanders

I always liked George Sanders even when he was in quite poor films; you couldn't help being struck by and admiring in a funny sort of way that plummy English accent, those rolling tones perfect for Wildean disdain (as in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"). He seemed to have made a living out of practising a soft kind of disdain that only in films in which he played a villain became vile.
I remember him in films like "Samson and Delila", "The Moon and Sixpence" and other poor stuff and, more pleasantly, in "All about Eve" and "This Land is Mine". Of course his early work as The Saint and thereafter The Falcon (played later by his elder brother, Tom Conway) was amusing, light entertainment and his late work was pretty disastrous. Then there were in-between films like "Rebecca", where he played someone he could do so well - the cad - and, also for Hitchcock, "Foreign Correspondent".
Of course his finest role was in "All about Eve" for which he won an oscar, deservedly so. A little known film which starred Charles Laughton had Sanders playing a man who collaborates with the Nazis and here I thought he was superb.
Maybe the best directors got the best out of him: Joseph Mankiewicz in "All about Eve"; Jean Renoir in "This Land is Mine" and Robert Rossellini in "Viaggio in Italia" (not seen by me) about which David Thomson has written "Rossellini boldly cut through irritability to the shy observer of life who hid behind Sanders's barbs."
Thomson again: "The movie business feels so flat nowadays without figures like George Sanders."

Bells

The bells in Ipswitch church have at last, after a quarter of a century, been repaired and are now ringing again. I wonder if the people living close to the church are as happy as those who helped repair and intsall the enormous bells; because they can be rather monotonous to hear. Wouldn't it be better if they played tunes as they do on the continent?
I think it was Dorothy L. Sayers who remarked that on the continent the church bells play tunes while in this country they play mathematical permutations.
I am not personally in favour of these loud sounds relayed across the land from such places as churches; maybe it reminds me of that hooter that used to, well, hoot from the local coal mine when I was a kid; it hooted loud and clear across the valleys every morning at about four o'clock to inform the miners that it was time they got out of bed and into their working clothes. What an intrusion in the lives of people? If they tried something like that these days there'd probably be a strike.
I think in some town in the north of England where there are great numbers of Muslims, it was mooted that a sort of hooter be used to call people to prayer. Thankfully it has not been installed. Yet!

Honesty

J.C.Grayling, the philosopher who attempts to make philosophy easy to undersatnd and to relate it to everyday ideas, writing to day in The Times wonders if we should dismiss dishonesty because "it can be virtuous". There are times when you need to be dishonest, he says. For example: "is it dishonest to tell someone that she looks nice in the hideous outfit she is wearing to save her feelings and your own embarrassment?" He says that kindness sometimes justifiably triumphs over truth.
I recall studying (if that's not too strong a word for it) an essay given us in school; it was by Hilaire Belloc and was in the form of a letter written by somone who intended to tell a friend the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I thought it quite amusing at the time. Of course the whole letter was a long insult. But I asked the teacher why the writer had written "Dear" whoever and ended with "Sincerely". Can't remember what she said but probably defended it on the grounds that these were commonly used methods of address rather than meaningful words.
The film "Liar Liar" with Jim Carrey is a similar kind of affair where he has to (for some reason I can't recall) always tell anyone he meets the truth. For Jim Carrey it was rather a good film I thought - I'm not a fan.
Grayling says unless we are on the whole truthful and honest in our dealings with other people, in business for example, then nothing will function in a practically good way. Which made me think of the man who repaired my roof last week. There was a small hole which he made larger. This was so that I couldn't say to him when he mentioned the fee "O, I'll find someone else". Then he said the fee and I had to agree because there was now a large hole in the roof and if he'd left the rain would have come pouring in.
In short, he could have told me pretty well any figure as a fee and I'd have had to pay it - or get wet. Or have the tiles blown off in a high wind, as he explained - "be an £1800 job then".
So there's business dealings and there's roofer's dealings. Cost me £280 by the way.

Somerset Maugham

A new book about the life of Somerset Maugham has been written by Selina Hastings and a very good book it appears to be having read a few reviews. One passage appealed to me because it showed a rather nice side to Maugham, something I have not been particularly aware of before now. The reviewer writes: "Rejected by the actress Sue Jones, he met Syrie Wellcome who ensnared him by falling pregnant... Syrie threatened to reveal the names of his male lovers if he did not marry her, just as 14 years later she would threaten to reveal them if he did not divorce her. 'By doing the right thing,' said Maugham, 'I brought happiness neither to her nor to myself'."
How is he rated now? I would say that as a playwright he is not rated highly yet he is a damn good one; even now after the period pieces have lost their relevance they work as dramas very effectively. As a novelist he is probably not read much - I found his first novel "Liza of Lambeth" pretty well unreadable, though I liked his "The Painted Veil". He will probably be remembered most as a short story writer, often as good as Maupassant or Chekov. Yet there is that feeling in me that there is something curmugeonly about his attitude to people; there is often an ironic twist in the tail that seems to say: "You may think you are living in a world where morals matter but let me tell you, they don't." It's an attitude more in keeping with the equally curmugeonly Evelyn Waugh than with Chekov, a wholly kindlier soul.
His novels never made good films but his short stories did. There were three films that each had three or four of his stories in them and they were not only critically successful but popular too. I once met a young American who said they were highly rated in the USA and that their filmmakers had tried to emulate them but had failed.
In those films he always introduced the stories himself. What a strange face he had with that downturned mouth and that wrinkled face. A bit like W.H.Auden's face of which Stravinsky is supposed to have said to a friend "One day I would like use a flat iron on his face to see what he really looks like."

Cary Grant

Whenever I catch the beginning of "North by Northwest" on TV (and it's often on these days) I cannot turn it off for at least 20 minutes; it is one of the best openings to a film I've ever seen. Cary Grant at his smoothest and handsomest (though really he was rather old for the part - older in fact than the woman who played his mother) involved in a spy plot that enabled him to show the two sides of the character he always was in films: sophisticated and suspicious at one and the same time. His verbal sparring with James Mason, in his sophisticated and deeply-ingrained-nastiness role, is wonderful to behold, choreographed brilliantly by Hitchcock. Then his drunk scene. Playing drunk can often be embarrassing to watch rather than funny; Grant makes it hilarious. And soon after, the scene in the UN building when a man is killed and Grant, catching him as he falls, removes the knife from the man's back and stands there, to be photographed, knife in hand over the dead body. Here he does a marvellous about turn: at first he is showing the crowd that it had nothing to do with him; then, realising he must appear to be the killer, sees that the only way he won't be arrested is to pretend he is the killer and to threaten everyone around him with the knife. It's a brilliant piece of thoughful acting that I wonder if anyone else could have achieved. Certainly not James Mason however masterful an actor he was. James Stewart maybe? Robert Mitchum maybe not.
David Thomson writes: "As well as being a leading box office draw..... he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema."
Agreed.