Tuesday, October 31, 2006
I am happily corrected
Fangland (one word) does have an Amazon page. If someone has an advance copy to send my way I will be very grateful!
Creative property
Partly, I think, as a memorial to his dear friend & fellow writer John M. Ford, who died recently without having left a will to direct the handling of his literary estate, Neil Gaiman has posted an excellent thing, a really valuable resource: a basic will format that creative artists of various kinds can use to make sure that after their deaths their work will be properly handled by executors. Here's the link to the will in PDF format.
Monday, October 30, 2006
I desperately want
a copy of John Marks' forthcoming novel Fang Marks, which does not seem to exist on Amazon but is praised by James Hynes in an excellent top-ten list of Halloween recommendations at Maud Newton's ever-delightful blog (oh, and I am glad to see Ira Levin get his props too, that guy is sort of an unsung genius these days & deserves a huge resurgence in popularity).
On Thursday evening at 7:30pm
Orhan Pamuk will speak with Arthur Danto about life, literature, etc. at Columbia's Miller Theater, here are the details for the event and here's where you have to go to reserve a (free) ticket.
The price of empire
Charles McGrath at the New York Times on Robert Fagles' new translation of Virgil's Aeneid. Now that is a poem I particularly love--I should teach a class on epic and mock-epic....
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Anthrodermic Bindings, or, Shorthand Made Shorter
At his blog Weekend Stubble, Paul Collins directs readers to his fascinating article for the Believer about the murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn, which led to a Truman Capoteesque flourishing of true-crime writing in nineteenth-century England (and here's the link for the associated NPR story, plus a neat appendix at the Believer that reprints some of the letters sent in response to the murderer's personals ad). NB I may be misremembering--brain like a sieve--but I believe another copy of the narrative bound in the murderer's skin exists in the collection of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, I imagine the surgeon in question had a number of copies bound at the same time for presents....
Money versus reputation
Lynn Barber profiles James Hamilton Paterson at the Observer. I want to read this guy's books--I remember being absolutely delighted with the excerpt from Cooking with Fernet Branca published in Granta a few years ago (also this is the point in the semester--and I am having a remarkably enjoyable semester, all told, my classes are very good and there's lots of stimulating stuff going on--when I want to retire to a European city where nobody knows me and write a lot of books, I am starved for writing time these days...).
The 'good things' Sunday miscellany
#1: Sarah Weinman's thoughtful review of the new Elizabeth George novel at Newsday.
#2: Gordon Bowker at the Observer on a new collection of Orwell essays (I am in love with Orwell's prose, I want this volume--oh, and Bowker says Orwell almost certainly coined the term "cold war"--interesting, eh?).
#3: My first official (timed) race this morning, very exciting--I am pleased with my results too, I totally cracked nine minutes (I feel I am allowed to gloat a bit as the running thing has come solely by virtue of extremely hard work & well-organized training, running is not my natural talent).
#4: Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape at the Irish Rep; not exactly a good play, I think, but a wonderfully appealing one, its expressionism and socialism take it totally over the top and on the whole it is somewhat dated but the language and aspects of the staging (as it's conceived, I mean, not just as it's performed--since I am too lazy to paste in correct accents from Microsoft Word it would seem ridiculous to say mise-en-scene!) are absolutely spectacular, I quite loved this & the production is really excellent. The old-style New York diction of the main character tips it over the edge into complete surrealness, in its own time I expect it would have been a bit more naturalistic (well, perhaps that's not right, it's dementedly expressionist in a quite delightful way, the chorus of stokers reminded me of the goblins in George MacDonald and the prison scene in particular is superb), but Greg Derelian is really amazingly good as Yank--my only quibble is that while his posture is perfect, exactly that hulking stooped high-waisted effect that you see in photographs of the old-time boxers from the 1920s, his musculature is rather too well-defined--should be better padded for historical accuracy, I think only in modern times have people so much been getting that low-body-fat effect--oh, and while it would be too much for me to paste in a hundred of the amazing lines about hairy apes, did you know that this play actually ends with the main character being crushed to death by a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo?!? Absolutely delightful in any case.
#5: And though you might think the union-organizer theme that O'Neill highlights would rather outmoded by now (but the Wobblies guy is one of the best things in the play, very well-acted too by Allen McCullough if I have correctly matched the actor to the part), I heard the true organizer vein last weekend at the lively & stimulating n+1 "little magazine" discussion--in a rather enjoyable late-stage controversial intervention from the audience, the basic premises of the magazine were challenged ("You guys are all the same!" he called out to the editors as they sat there at the front of the lecture hall) by a strident character who, it later turned out, is Benj DeMott, son of the critic Benjamin DeMott and himself editor of the radical/literary tabloid First of the Month. We all perked up, controversy is exciting; and here is the link for the first part of DeMott the Younger's essay about his father in the magazine's current issue. (Thanks to whatever well-wisher slipped the paper issue under my office door, I was indeed very interested to read it after hearing its editor's characterization.)
#2: Gordon Bowker at the Observer on a new collection of Orwell essays (I am in love with Orwell's prose, I want this volume--oh, and Bowker says Orwell almost certainly coined the term "cold war"--interesting, eh?).
#3: My first official (timed) race this morning, very exciting--I am pleased with my results too, I totally cracked nine minutes (I feel I am allowed to gloat a bit as the running thing has come solely by virtue of extremely hard work & well-organized training, running is not my natural talent).
#4: Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape at the Irish Rep; not exactly a good play, I think, but a wonderfully appealing one, its expressionism and socialism take it totally over the top and on the whole it is somewhat dated but the language and aspects of the staging (as it's conceived, I mean, not just as it's performed--since I am too lazy to paste in correct accents from Microsoft Word it would seem ridiculous to say mise-en-scene!) are absolutely spectacular, I quite loved this & the production is really excellent. The old-style New York diction of the main character tips it over the edge into complete surrealness, in its own time I expect it would have been a bit more naturalistic (well, perhaps that's not right, it's dementedly expressionist in a quite delightful way, the chorus of stokers reminded me of the goblins in George MacDonald and the prison scene in particular is superb), but Greg Derelian is really amazingly good as Yank--my only quibble is that while his posture is perfect, exactly that hulking stooped high-waisted effect that you see in photographs of the old-time boxers from the 1920s, his musculature is rather too well-defined--should be better padded for historical accuracy, I think only in modern times have people so much been getting that low-body-fat effect--oh, and while it would be too much for me to paste in a hundred of the amazing lines about hairy apes, did you know that this play actually ends with the main character being crushed to death by a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo?!? Absolutely delightful in any case.
#5: And though you might think the union-organizer theme that O'Neill highlights would rather outmoded by now (but the Wobblies guy is one of the best things in the play, very well-acted too by Allen McCullough if I have correctly matched the actor to the part), I heard the true organizer vein last weekend at the lively & stimulating n+1 "little magazine" discussion--in a rather enjoyable late-stage controversial intervention from the audience, the basic premises of the magazine were challenged ("You guys are all the same!" he called out to the editors as they sat there at the front of the lecture hall) by a strident character who, it later turned out, is Benj DeMott, son of the critic Benjamin DeMott and himself editor of the radical/literary tabloid First of the Month. We all perked up, controversy is exciting; and here is the link for the first part of DeMott the Younger's essay about his father in the magazine's current issue. (Thanks to whatever well-wisher slipped the paper issue under my office door, I was indeed very interested to read it after hearing its editor's characterization.)
Them's the cords...
Alan Deutschman on Erik Larson's new book Thunderstruck at the San Francisco Chronicle. Telegraph helps catch murderer--at first I thought this was going to be a book about a particular favorite murderer of mine (one who featured prominently in my undergraduate senior thesis), John Tawell, the first criminal to achieve notoriety for being apprehended with the help of the electric telegraph--unfortunately not--but it still sounds very good, it's Crippen and Marconi in this case.
Clearly murderers end up virtually interchangeable in my memory, because I also want to say--but it might have been a completely different one, and I am not sure in any case about the source for this fact, sounds to me like family myth rather than historical fact though I suppose it's not inherently that unlikely--that my great-grandfather was on the jury that hanged Crippen, and that it was just before my grandfather was born. Hmmm...
Clearly murderers end up virtually interchangeable in my memory, because I also want to say--but it might have been a completely different one, and I am not sure in any case about the source for this fact, sounds to me like family myth rather than historical fact though I suppose it's not inherently that unlikely--that my great-grandfather was on the jury that hanged Crippen, and that it was just before my grandfather was born. Hmmm...
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Cadmium
At the NYTBR, Adam Goodheart makes a diagnosis about Charles Frazier's fiction:
The problem, I think, is that Frazier writes almost exclusively to create effects. He seems to be in love with the supposed gorgeousness of his own prose, a backdrop against which his characters emerge merely as dim figures, without consistent motivations or even personalities. Tolstoy and Virgil — and, come to think of it, Margaret Mitchell — credibly describe human beings driven by ambition, greed, drunkenness and fickle lust. Frazier can’t even get the drunkenness right. When Will is reunited with an old Cherokee buddy, “at a certain point of whiskey camaraderie, we contested to name all the colors the mountains and their foliage are able to take on. ... We went on down the colors, even all the purples, including puce. And the yellows including cadmium.” Now that’s what I’d call a couple of tough old-timers, getting plastered and chitchatting about cadmium and puce! (Unfortunately, they run through the rest of the color spectrum, as well.)
Also worth noting: Alexandra Jacobs on Laura Kipnis (and Jacobs had a hilarious piece in the Observer this week about the Spy magazine book--she's developed a fantastically good voice for this sort of thing, very bitchy in a good-humored way--if you learned that she was about to review your new book, you would be half terrified and half curious to see what she'd say--here's the Spy link).
The problem, I think, is that Frazier writes almost exclusively to create effects. He seems to be in love with the supposed gorgeousness of his own prose, a backdrop against which his characters emerge merely as dim figures, without consistent motivations or even personalities. Tolstoy and Virgil — and, come to think of it, Margaret Mitchell — credibly describe human beings driven by ambition, greed, drunkenness and fickle lust. Frazier can’t even get the drunkenness right. When Will is reunited with an old Cherokee buddy, “at a certain point of whiskey camaraderie, we contested to name all the colors the mountains and their foliage are able to take on. ... We went on down the colors, even all the purples, including puce. And the yellows including cadmium.” Now that’s what I’d call a couple of tough old-timers, getting plastered and chitchatting about cadmium and puce! (Unfortunately, they run through the rest of the color spectrum, as well.)
Also worth noting: Alexandra Jacobs on Laura Kipnis (and Jacobs had a hilarious piece in the Observer this week about the Spy magazine book--she's developed a fantastically good voice for this sort of thing, very bitchy in a good-humored way--if you learned that she was about to review your new book, you would be half terrified and half curious to see what she'd say--here's the Spy link).
Friday, October 27, 2006
Boredom, real life and the life of the imagination
Orhan Pamuk on writing novels, at the Guardian. His tone is a bit serious for my taste, but much of what he says strikes me as exactly right (boredom in particular is surely the most necessary ingredient for writing, I find I have to let the boredom and understimulation mount up over the course of the morning to an alarming and actively unpleasant degree before I steel myself and sit down to write):
Let me explain what I feel on a day when I've not written well, if I'm not lost in a book. First, the world changes before my eyes: it becomes unbearable, abominable; those who know me can see it happening to me, too, for I myself come to resemble the world I see around me. For example, my daughter can tell that I have not written well that day from the abject hopelessness on my face in the evening. I would like to be able to hide this from her, but I cannot. During these dark moments, I feel as if there is no line between life and death. I don't want to speak to anyone, and anyone seeing me in this state has no desire to speak to me either. A milder version of this despair descends on me every afternoon, in fact, between one and three, but I have learned how to treat it by reading and writing: if I act promptly, I can save myself from a full retreat to my corpse.
If I've had to go a long stretch without my paper-and-ink cure, be it due to travel, an unpaid gas bill, military service (as was once the case), political affairs (as has been the case more recently) or any number of other obstacles, I can feel my misery setting inside me like cement. My body has difficulty moving through space, my joints get stiff, my head turns to stone, my perspiration even seems to have another smell. This misery can only grow, for life is full of punishments that distance a person from literature. I can be sitting in a crowded political meeting, or chatting with my classmates in a school corridor, or eating a holiday meal with my relatives, struggling to converse with a good-hearted person whose mind is worlds away or else occupied by whatever is happening on the TV screen; I can be at an important "business meeting", making an ordinary purchase, making my way to the notary, or having my picture taken for a visa - suddenly my eyelids will grow heavy, and though it is the middle of the day, I'll fall asleep. When I am far away from home, and therefore unable to return to my room to spend time alone, my only consolation is a nap in the middle of the day.
So yes, the real hunger here is not for literature, but for a room where I can be alone and dream. If I can do this, I can invent beautiful dreams about those same crowded places, those family gatherings, school reunions, festival meals and all the people who attend them. I enrich the crowded holiday meals with invented details and make the people themselves even more amusing. In dreams, of course, everything and everyone is interesting, captivating and real. I make the new world from the stuff of the known world. Here we come to the heart of the matter. To write well, I must first be bored to distraction; to be bored to distraction, I must enter into life. It is when I am bombarded with noise, sitting in an office full of ringing phones, surrounded by friends and loved ones on a sunny seashore or at a rainy funeral - in other words, at the very moment when I begin to sense the heart of the scene unfolding around me - that I will suddenly feel as if I'm no longer really there, but watching from the sidelines. I'll begin to daydream. If I'm feeling pessimistic, I can think about how bored I am. Either way, there will be a voice inside me, urging me to "go back to the room and sit down at the table". I have no idea what most people do in such circumstances, but it is this that turns people like me into writers. My guess is that it leads not to poetry but to prose and fiction. This sheds a bit more light on the properties of the medicine I must be sure to take every day. We can see now that its ingredients are boredom, real life and the life of the imagination.
Let me explain what I feel on a day when I've not written well, if I'm not lost in a book. First, the world changes before my eyes: it becomes unbearable, abominable; those who know me can see it happening to me, too, for I myself come to resemble the world I see around me. For example, my daughter can tell that I have not written well that day from the abject hopelessness on my face in the evening. I would like to be able to hide this from her, but I cannot. During these dark moments, I feel as if there is no line between life and death. I don't want to speak to anyone, and anyone seeing me in this state has no desire to speak to me either. A milder version of this despair descends on me every afternoon, in fact, between one and three, but I have learned how to treat it by reading and writing: if I act promptly, I can save myself from a full retreat to my corpse.
If I've had to go a long stretch without my paper-and-ink cure, be it due to travel, an unpaid gas bill, military service (as was once the case), political affairs (as has been the case more recently) or any number of other obstacles, I can feel my misery setting inside me like cement. My body has difficulty moving through space, my joints get stiff, my head turns to stone, my perspiration even seems to have another smell. This misery can only grow, for life is full of punishments that distance a person from literature. I can be sitting in a crowded political meeting, or chatting with my classmates in a school corridor, or eating a holiday meal with my relatives, struggling to converse with a good-hearted person whose mind is worlds away or else occupied by whatever is happening on the TV screen; I can be at an important "business meeting", making an ordinary purchase, making my way to the notary, or having my picture taken for a visa - suddenly my eyelids will grow heavy, and though it is the middle of the day, I'll fall asleep. When I am far away from home, and therefore unable to return to my room to spend time alone, my only consolation is a nap in the middle of the day.
So yes, the real hunger here is not for literature, but for a room where I can be alone and dream. If I can do this, I can invent beautiful dreams about those same crowded places, those family gatherings, school reunions, festival meals and all the people who attend them. I enrich the crowded holiday meals with invented details and make the people themselves even more amusing. In dreams, of course, everything and everyone is interesting, captivating and real. I make the new world from the stuff of the known world. Here we come to the heart of the matter. To write well, I must first be bored to distraction; to be bored to distraction, I must enter into life. It is when I am bombarded with noise, sitting in an office full of ringing phones, surrounded by friends and loved ones on a sunny seashore or at a rainy funeral - in other words, at the very moment when I begin to sense the heart of the scene unfolding around me - that I will suddenly feel as if I'm no longer really there, but watching from the sidelines. I'll begin to daydream. If I'm feeling pessimistic, I can think about how bored I am. Either way, there will be a voice inside me, urging me to "go back to the room and sit down at the table". I have no idea what most people do in such circumstances, but it is this that turns people like me into writers. My guess is that it leads not to poetry but to prose and fiction. This sheds a bit more light on the properties of the medicine I must be sure to take every day. We can see now that its ingredients are boredom, real life and the life of the imagination.
How to get rich quick
Jenny Diski at the Guardian on why to write a book. (The piece is cross-posted at her excellent blog.) I post all the time here about Diski, she's definitely one of my particular favorite writers; here were my thoughts on her latest essay collection, which I was happily seduced into ordering from Amazon UK. (This is the Amazon US link, but I think it must have been a limited release of some kind.)
Here's a bit from the essay titled "On spiders and respect for sheep," it expresses a sentiment that speaks directly to my inner recluse:
Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.
Here's a bit from the essay titled "On spiders and respect for sheep," it expresses a sentiment that speaks directly to my inner recluse:
Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.
Miscellaneous literary things
Mick Imlah writing at the TLS persuades me that I must read Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan sequel (oh, and Carol Tavris has an extremely bitter and damning indictment of Alice Miller's writings on child psychology and the specter of parental abuse); also, Neal Ascherson at the LRB on Gunter Grass (when is that book going to appear in English?!? I remember being mesmerized by The Tin Drum when I was sixteen & read it for the first time--I still horribly always think of it when I eat the delicious thing that is eel...) and David Runciman, also at the LRB, with a quite wonderful piece on political hypocrisy.
I'm going to paste in a big chunk, because hypocrisy is one of my longtime obsessions (I even wrote a book about it)--the contributor bio says that Runciman is writing a book about hypocrisy in political thought from Machiavelli to Orwell (two touchstones of mine as well), how excellent. Anyway, here's Runciman:
During Liars’ Week at the Labour Party Conference last month – when Gordon pretended that he still had a lot of time for Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is tempting to think that a lie is a lie is a lie, and since everyone is at it, all that matters is what you can get away with. But that is to do Tony Blair a disservice. He is not simply the boldest liar, he is also the best, in that he understands better than anyone the new rules of political fabrication. He comprehensively outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown in Manchester by being truer both to himself and to the spirit of contemporary politics in the way he stretched the truth. Blair was sincere in the lies he told. Brown, by contrast, came across as a straightforward hypocrite.
Take the statement that is said to have provoked the outburst from Cherie. What Brown claimed in his speech was that it had been a privilege to serve under Tony Blair as prime minister. This was too much for Cherie to stomach, but strictly speaking it wasn’t a lie, since every chancellor holds office on the sufferance of the prime minister, and for Blair to have put up with Brown for so long was indeed quite an honour. What’s more, I have a horrible feeling that Brown said it because he knew it wasn’t technically untrue, and his own sense of probity required that whatever he said to smooth over his differences with Blair shouldn’t be a brazen falsehood. Brown is not a born liar: he is, as we keep being reminded, a son of the manse, which, if it means anything, means that. But by not actually lying, Brown came across as something worse, a man who was happy to conceal the true state of his feelings. Because what was transparent, and what Cherie instantly picked up on, is that Brown would never have said what he said in the conference hall if he had been free to speak his mind. It is impossible to imagine Gordon Brown in a private setting, surrounded by his intimates and his acolytes, using the word ‘privilege’ to describe his relationship with the prime minister. Compare this with what Blair said about Brown: he called him a ‘remarkable man, a remarkable servant to this country’. It is easy to imagine Blair holding to this line, through thick and thin, in public and in private, even in the heat of battle with Cherie, because he is happy to allow it to be true. Yet at the same time, when he did say it, he wanted his audience to believe it was false, because the purpose of Blair’s speech, indeed of the entire conference, was to question Brown’s suitability as his possible successor. Blair displayed the liar’s disregard for the truth, but not the hypocrite’s detachment from his own true feelings.
Hypocrisy comes in many different forms, and Gordon Brown by no means ticks the boxes for all of them. The common or garden type is not practising what you preach, which is not Brown’s problem at all. His innate cautiousness, and his apparently settled and blameless personal life, make him almost painfully eager not to fall into this trap. Not for Brown the ghastly contortions of John Prescott, happy to scourge the Tories for their failings as husbands and fathers in the dog days of the Major administration, but equally happy to try it on himself when a comely employee fell his way. Yet this sort of hypocrisy doesn’t seem to bother people much these days, though it gives everyone great pleasure when it comes to light. Prescott is now something of a joke, but he is still deputy prime minister, and he was able to pre-announce his retirement on his own terms, having stage-managed his little moment of contrition at the Labour Conference. Certainly, he had a better time in Manchester than Brown did.
Brown’s hypocrisy is much closer to the classical sense of the term, which involves not believing what you say. The original hypocrites were persons of apparent faith who were simply mouthing the pieties: it meant going through the motions (only later did it come to be attached to the sort of puritans who laid down rules they couldn’t possibly abide by themselves). Even here, there have always been different ways of dissembling what is going on behind the public mask. The pious hypocrites who pretend to be true believers are liars, because what they claim of themselves is not true. But it is also possible to conceal the truth about oneself by sticking to the truth in public: that is, by sticking to a kind of public truth, so that what comes out of your mouth is the bare minimum that allows you to get by. This is Brown’s particular vice, and it makes him appear to be someone who is always holding something back, something he would only ever be willing to share among people he really trusts, which emphatically does not include the public at large. It is Brown’s great misfortune that this now appears to be the kind of hypocrite that the public really detests, much more than they hate the liars and adulterers and fools that populate the political scene. What no politician can safely afford is to look as though he is keeping some private truth to himself.
I'm going to paste in a big chunk, because hypocrisy is one of my longtime obsessions (I even wrote a book about it)--the contributor bio says that Runciman is writing a book about hypocrisy in political thought from Machiavelli to Orwell (two touchstones of mine as well), how excellent. Anyway, here's Runciman:
During Liars’ Week at the Labour Party Conference last month – when Gordon pretended that he still had a lot of time for Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is tempting to think that a lie is a lie is a lie, and since everyone is at it, all that matters is what you can get away with. But that is to do Tony Blair a disservice. He is not simply the boldest liar, he is also the best, in that he understands better than anyone the new rules of political fabrication. He comprehensively outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown in Manchester by being truer both to himself and to the spirit of contemporary politics in the way he stretched the truth. Blair was sincere in the lies he told. Brown, by contrast, came across as a straightforward hypocrite.
Take the statement that is said to have provoked the outburst from Cherie. What Brown claimed in his speech was that it had been a privilege to serve under Tony Blair as prime minister. This was too much for Cherie to stomach, but strictly speaking it wasn’t a lie, since every chancellor holds office on the sufferance of the prime minister, and for Blair to have put up with Brown for so long was indeed quite an honour. What’s more, I have a horrible feeling that Brown said it because he knew it wasn’t technically untrue, and his own sense of probity required that whatever he said to smooth over his differences with Blair shouldn’t be a brazen falsehood. Brown is not a born liar: he is, as we keep being reminded, a son of the manse, which, if it means anything, means that. But by not actually lying, Brown came across as something worse, a man who was happy to conceal the true state of his feelings. Because what was transparent, and what Cherie instantly picked up on, is that Brown would never have said what he said in the conference hall if he had been free to speak his mind. It is impossible to imagine Gordon Brown in a private setting, surrounded by his intimates and his acolytes, using the word ‘privilege’ to describe his relationship with the prime minister. Compare this with what Blair said about Brown: he called him a ‘remarkable man, a remarkable servant to this country’. It is easy to imagine Blair holding to this line, through thick and thin, in public and in private, even in the heat of battle with Cherie, because he is happy to allow it to be true. Yet at the same time, when he did say it, he wanted his audience to believe it was false, because the purpose of Blair’s speech, indeed of the entire conference, was to question Brown’s suitability as his possible successor. Blair displayed the liar’s disregard for the truth, but not the hypocrite’s detachment from his own true feelings.
Hypocrisy comes in many different forms, and Gordon Brown by no means ticks the boxes for all of them. The common or garden type is not practising what you preach, which is not Brown’s problem at all. His innate cautiousness, and his apparently settled and blameless personal life, make him almost painfully eager not to fall into this trap. Not for Brown the ghastly contortions of John Prescott, happy to scourge the Tories for their failings as husbands and fathers in the dog days of the Major administration, but equally happy to try it on himself when a comely employee fell his way. Yet this sort of hypocrisy doesn’t seem to bother people much these days, though it gives everyone great pleasure when it comes to light. Prescott is now something of a joke, but he is still deputy prime minister, and he was able to pre-announce his retirement on his own terms, having stage-managed his little moment of contrition at the Labour Conference. Certainly, he had a better time in Manchester than Brown did.
Brown’s hypocrisy is much closer to the classical sense of the term, which involves not believing what you say. The original hypocrites were persons of apparent faith who were simply mouthing the pieties: it meant going through the motions (only later did it come to be attached to the sort of puritans who laid down rules they couldn’t possibly abide by themselves). Even here, there have always been different ways of dissembling what is going on behind the public mask. The pious hypocrites who pretend to be true believers are liars, because what they claim of themselves is not true. But it is also possible to conceal the truth about oneself by sticking to the truth in public: that is, by sticking to a kind of public truth, so that what comes out of your mouth is the bare minimum that allows you to get by. This is Brown’s particular vice, and it makes him appear to be someone who is always holding something back, something he would only ever be willing to share among people he really trusts, which emphatically does not include the public at large. It is Brown’s great misfortune that this now appears to be the kind of hypocrite that the public really detests, much more than they hate the liars and adulterers and fools that populate the political scene. What no politician can safely afford is to look as though he is keeping some private truth to himself.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost
reviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus at the Nation. I can't wait to read this one, not sure when that will happen though I hope soon--meanwhile it's tantalizing to see the reviews... (Thanks to the Elegant Variation for the link.)
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