A Mad, Witty, Terrible Weekend at Clouds Hill

There’s a play I want to see which hasn’t been written.  Scary words.  The last time I wrote a sentence like that - well I’m still adventuring through the consequences of that statement.  Nevertheless, there is a play I badly want to see which hasn’t been written.

Just over a week ago we had the great good fortune to see the NTLive broadcast of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman with Indira Varma and Ralph Fiennes directed by Simon Godwin.  It’s my favorite Shaw play, I consider it his best, and I’ve only seen it performed once before, (an exquisite production years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)  It’s rarely staged in it’s entirely both because of its length and, more importantly, the immense technical challenge it poses for the actors.  If King Lear is an Everest, Man and Superman is a K2.

 

Then, there were the terrorist attacks in Tunisia and France this week.  The personal tragedies of the victims and the sorrow and uncertainty their families are enduring brought me back to the immediacy of what has been an historical week in so many ways.  When I ruminate about the Middle East, I always come back to T. E. Lawrence who accomplished his ambition to make history and chronicle it and thence foresaw the anguish the region would endure.  I would argue that Seven Pillars of Wisdom generally, but accurately prophesied the future of the region up through the 1990s.  I wonder what he would make of it now.

Shaw and Lawrence knew each other in the 1920s.  Lawrence was in his early thirties, wrestling with the legacy of historical achievement and his wild, brilliant lion of a memoir, grieving over fundamental issues like style and length.  Shaw was in his sixties, lionized, married to a woman who was also a formidable literary companion and feminist activist, Charlotte Payne-Townsend.

Jeremy Wilson, in his seminal biography of Lawrence, writes of his state of mind at the time,

                …The romantic Victorian concepts that he had so willingly adopted in his youth were one by one falling away.  His evangelical Christianity had faded before the war; at Uxbridge he had written: ‘Hungry time has taken from me year by year more of the Creed’s clauses, till now only the first four words remain.  Them I say defiantly, hoping that reason may be stung into new activity when it hears there’s yet a part of me which escapes its rule.’  The vision of the ‘noble savage,’ which had been a guiding principle during his Carchemish years, had crumbled during the Arab Revolt…He had abandoned one of the fundamental tenets of his Victorian upbringing:  belief in the progress of mankind, and now he had concluded that romantic love, a concept he had been brought up to revere, was nothing more than animal lust.

In contrast, consider the implicit optimism in this short excerpt from Man and Superman in which Jack Tanner is trying to discover the fundamental principles of male and female psychology,

                …the artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are.  Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men.

Lawrence was imprisoned by experience and values in a dark world view, whereas, Shaw, against such odds, was working to discover and define an optimistic vision of human purpose.

And that is the play I want to see:  a portrayal of one of their weekends together at Lawrence’s cottage at Clouds  Hill.  The play is not simple, nor is everyone whom they first appear to be.  After all, it was Shaw’s terrible and self-serving guidance to Lawrence about the publication of Seven Pillars that forced Lawrence to remain in the military when he might have found a more rewarding and optimistic life outside.

The challenge is immense.  Imagine trying to channel and imagine new Shavian wit and Lawrence’s erudition while making it dramatically compelling.  How about giving it a go Peter Morgan?

As the 20th Century flies away from us

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “The Passenger” there is a wonderful cinematographic moment as Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson are driving through a forest in a convertible car.  She turns around in the passenger’s seat and then we simply watch the forest receding into the distance.  It’s a view  few, save perhaps unruly children have.  In the context of the film it is linked metaphorically to a  recession of experience, memory and identity.

We’re 14 years into the 21^st century and the 20^th is now receding away from us like that forest in Antonioni’s film.  The daunting task of how to understand, appreciate and learn from it remain, as it always will, but, because of its proximity, the imperative to do so is perhaps as strong now as it ever will be.

Fiction can be a particularly powerful instrument for such endeavors.  For example, anyone trying to understand European history of the early nineteenth century is supremely lucky:  there is Tolstoy and War and Peace.  Sure, it’s work, particularly for the casual reader in translation, but the immense rewards are so disproportionate.  It remains prima facie evidence of the towering value of reading “difficult” books, a pursuit perhaps less appreciated than it once was, and not unfairly.  The last part of the 20^th century particularly suffered from innumerable works of questionable value which were contrived to be difficult but offered little in return.

A few books, many neglected, stand out for me as supremely useful for glimpsing the 20^th century as it was lived.  Some are difficult, some are easy, many are rarely read.  Some I encountered as a child in my grandmother’s small library.  Others I’ve encountered quite recently.  Nearly all are memoirs.

The first is Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  The book remains as controversial now as when it first appeared.  As of late it seems particularly popular to denigrate it on the grounds of historical accuracy or for T. E. Lawrence’s presumed heroic self-portrayal.  I’ve even seen it categorized as fiction.  It is not.  It is clearly and unambiguously a memoir and Lawrence is nothing if not self-effacing and often very funny.  It is a difficult book.   It necessarily portrays a vast set of characters and it takes place in a rich and exotic geography entirely foreign to most English readers.  But it is the memoir of an intense, intelligent, supremely perceptive man at a place and time supremely important to subsequent history and current world events.  As proof, consider these two very different examples.  In chapter 2, Lawrence surveys the history of the Arabian Peninsula and forecasts its likely future history.  He was writing in the early 1920s yet he accurately, and sadly, predicts what did happen in the next seventy years.  In contrast of scale and immediacy, here is Lawrence writing of the experience of riding a camel in the desert,

“I seemed at last approaching the insensibility which had always been beyond my reach: but a delectable land: for one born so slug-tissued that nothing this side fainting would let his spirit free. Now I found myself dividing into parts. There was one which went on riding wisely, sparing or helping every pace of the wearied camel. Another hovering above and to the right bent down curiously, and asked what the flesh was doing. The flesh gave no answer, for, indeed, it was conscious only of a ruling impulse to keep on and on; but a third garrulous one talked and wondered, critical of the body's self-inflicted labour, and contemptuous of the reason for effort.”

At once the physical experience is visceral, metaphysical and psychological.  At so many levels you are along for the ride.

Here is another.  Wind, Sand and Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  He is known, of course, for “The Little Prince,” but the former is by far the much more important work in this context.  Human piloted aviation remains one of the signal and romantic achievements of the 20^th century, so much so that even now, in the face of contrary evidence, space flight is portrayed as being like the dogfights of World War II fighter pilots.  “Wind, Sand and Stars,” like “Seven Pillars” captures not only the visceral exhilaration of flight, but the psychology and philosophical aspirations it created in those  few, brave adventurers.  One reads “Wind, Sand, and Stars” to experience not only the feeling and vision of pilots surmounting the Andes or flying across the sands of North Africa at night in fragile single engine airplanes but their psychology, and optimistic humanism as well.  There was a time when reading St. Ex. Was as much a part of learning to fly as learning the radio alphabet.

A very easy, and popular, read is Hemingway’s A moveable Feast, his loving memoir of life in Paris in the 1930s.  Woody Allen’s enjoyable film “Midnight in Paris,” can be seen as a paean to Hemingway’s memoir which is simply more fun if only because you’re in 1930’s Paris for the duration.  Here’s a treat:  order a café au lait at the Café Les Deux Magots or at the Café de Flore on Blvd. Saint-Germain on a weekday April Morning and read a couple of chapters.  You may find you’ll never forget the day, the weather, the people, or your particular thoughts that morning.

Two memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I poet, are unfairly neglected and probably rarely read.  Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are a discordant pair that suggest questions that are disturbingly pertinent to the beginning of the 21^st century.  The first gently eases you into the cares and interests of Edwardian country life; the second matter-of-factly places you in the overwhelming horror of infinite trench warfare.

One unifying aspect of all the books I’ve mentioned is the role of the writer and narrator.  In each, the author not only aspires to literary excellence, he also is an active participant in the events he narrates. He seeks to shape those events and consequent adventures, and feels a moral or aesthetic imperative to do so.  It is a rare gift of insight from a difficult, often seemingly incomprehensible century.  The words of Dylan Thomas come to mind:

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.