The Ruffian in the Bed
The Orton Diaries, by Joe Orton
£7.99, Canongate (2003)
Joe Orton blazed a trail across the skies of the London thespian scene in the 1960s. His plays, specifically Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, The Ruffian on the Stair and What the Butler Saw, were blistering, amoral commentaries on contemporary society, yet still have a vicious, gleeful sting to them. He was as overtly homosexual as one could be at the time, indulging in cottaging and trips abroad for sex. Margaret Ramsay, his agent, persuaded him to begin writing a memoir for posterity’s sake; eight months later his long-suffering partner Kenneth Halliwell, having been prescribed drugs for depression, bludgeoned Joe to death and then committed suicide. The diaries, Halliwell wrote in his suicide note, would explain all.
What we learn primarily from these diaries is that Joe Orton had more than his fair share of bumsex, and a lot of it in Tangier. There’s more bumsex than you can shake a stick at, and Orton shakes his a great deal. Bumsex bumsex bumsex… you hopefully get the idea, but it’s a shame that Orton’s cock and arse eclipse such witty observational comedy. Every bus or train journey, Orton overhears and dutifully reports some ridiculous conversation snippet. He can be vicious about the middle class, and the lack of respect for literary peers and ancestors shown by both Orton and Halliwell landed them in jail for defacing library books.
To be fair, along with his tempestuous relationship with Halliwell (both emotional and professional, as Halliwell suggests changes and new ideas) the diaries reveal almost in passing so much about Orton. Reading between the lines of dirty talk, it’s clear that he was so angry that he had passed through inarticulation. He had honed a sharp, Swiftian knifeblade of comment that he then used to hack away at modern morality. He wrote quickly and keenly, revised just as quickly, and in the absence of the awful violence which did for him he’d probably still be writing now. I wonder what about. Bumsex, probably.
posted at: 15:51 |
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People who don’t need people
1982 Janine, by Alasdair Gray
£7.99, Canongate (2003)
For a man so utterly alone, Jock MacLeish is hardly lonely. So he’s eschewed all meaningful relationships. So he’s now haunted by his own insomniac self, in a hotel room in Peebles (or is it Selkirk: what day is it?). But he still keeps himself company, with the women who populate his relentlessly pornographic, if sometimes barely sexual, fantasies. In one night, with one bottle of scotch, one of pills, and a surprise appearance from God, Jock will take his imaginary women and his own dark self to pieces. He’ll examine each piece in turn, and cast everything he hates into the fire that’s brewing in his single malt. It’s not clear if there’ll be anything left by morning.
Alasdair Gray writes richly and deeply, reveals rarely and tantalisingly, and is utterly unafraid of experimenting with typography, dialect, narrative… any aspect of the novel is fair game. He captures the grim selfishness of Thatcherite Britain and the sexual power politics of a middle-aged misogynistic misanthrope perfectly. Jock is an intellectual and idealist, but when he capitulates he makes his fortune. Of course, he loses everything in the process—Denny, Alan, Helen, his parents, his self-respect (although he’d deny it if you asked)—but he compensates by steeping his soul in the powerful opium of his girls: Janine, Superb and all the others who relentlessly parade, undress, are kidnapped, resist, parade, undress.
But those girls: they’re not just a defect in Jock, they’re the problem with this novel. A large chunk of it is ostensibly made of these short stories which, intentionally, aren’t believable and never reach a climax (although, true to Gray’s typical warts-and-all methodology, Jock reaches one or two). These fantasies are part scalpels that dissect Jock, part phantasms of his boozed state that force the reader to share in his confusion; but they’re so annoying and invasive, an interruption rather than a revelation. Only in these does Gray ever hammer a point home too hard: hate Jock, Gray tells us; hate him and pity him. But we don’t need any more convincing. Gray’s prose in itself carries conviction, and he needn’t try as hard as he does in 1982 Janine.
posted at: 11:02 |
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