Ticklish delight
Moab is my Washpot, by Stephen Fry
£7.99, Arrow (2004)
Stephen Fry had an interesting first twenty years. So did a lot of people, and a lot of biographies describe such childhoods. So far, so similar. Well, in Fry’s case, his life might have been rather conventional, and sometimes dull in a middle-class way, were it not that he himself unintentionally, self-destructively, livened it up. Theft. Fraud. Abscondment. Pursuit by the law. A criminal record. Add in this mix an all-boy’s public school, smatterings of sex, and the tortured writhings of an adolescent’s soul, related by a literate, interesting, talented adult who writhes just as much in embarrassment: from its premise, Moab is my Washpot can only be either a harrowing car-crash of a read or a source of page after page of fascination.
To grow up anywhere in the vicinity of Fry’s comedy and writing is to fall a little in love with his public persona: occasionally irritated, certainly, and tired at his relentless tweediness, but love, like public school’s rather robust ersatz, sometimes hurts. We all want an evening with Stephen Fry, and this autobiography is exactly that. He talks, he reveals, he riffs and creates, tying his slightly unexciting toddlerhood to funny (although nowadays slightly hackneyed) observations on English culture, and relentlessly analysing (and largely castigating) his later actions. One gets the sense of the author sitting by one’s side and telling the story: luckily, it’s told so well that this only adds to the experience.
Oddly, for a pedant like Fry, there’s an abundance of minor errors (in the 1997 edition) that even the most basic of proofreading would have discovered: missing vocative commas, commas in the places of full stops, the occasional clumsy or ambiguous sentence. It’s almost as though he has indeed dictated it to an amanuensis, perhaps to deliberately develop the flavour of An Evening With Stephen Fry. Yet at least once he mentions he’s typing it himself. Has he fallen victim to the post-proofing butchery of sub-editors, or is this really only a first draft, printed stet and off the cuff? If this is a first draft, we should all feel a pang of jealousy towards this genius—although he would balk and dissemble if so called—who is able to engage and entertain, for some four hundred pages without a break, with all the apparent ease of a don smoking a pipe in the senior common room.
posted at: 15:49 |
path: / f / fry_stephen |
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Slow, slow, slow-slow slow
From the Diary of a Snail, by Günter Grass
£7.99, Minerva (1997)
When Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt by his contemporaries, began teaching Jews and collecting snails during the prelude to the second World War, he probably didn’t intend to become a champion for the underdogs. Doubt would never have made such a definite political statement, children; Doubt moves slowly, like his snails. He works hard, not with the ethic of the Protestant nor the gloom of the martyr to the economy, but with the manner of one shoring up sandbags against time. He sees the plaintive, whirling dervishes of here-and-now revolution, frowns and slows down: not just to watch, but to check his own speed.
Grass aligned himself—probably still does—with Doubt in his partly fictional account of his own campaign trail during the 1969 election. The word “trail” develops many meanings as, in Grass’ memoir, the snails that Doubt collects become the symbol of Social Democratic policy, and slowness the responsibility and duty of the intellectual in politics. Grass and Doubt follow their separate, dogged routes some thirty years apart, meeting on, say, a windswept beach so that Grass can air his grievances: not with the world, but with his own over-eagerness. Doubt is always there at Grass’ right hand, holding him back with history’s lesson, that to rush headlong is to eventually perish.
In this translated work, much of Grass’ original project is evident. Narratives are rich and intertwine in a complicated montage that echoes Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Presumably it has been just as difficult to translate, as a lot of the effect is lost. Some of Grass’ semi-spontaneous poetry is absolutely appalling in the English, ranging from mawkish to sesquipedalian with no redeeming qualities in between. The fact that Grass is on one level writing to answer the questions of his own sons and daughters is hammered home each and every time he calls the reader “children” (which is probably Grass’ own error). But his grasp of atmosphere and storytelling survives Grass’ occasional patronising and Ralph Manheim’s pedestrian translation. By detecting in advance whether the next section has odd line lengths it’s easy to anticipate most of the dross and skip over to the next cleverly-crafted chunk of prose.
At a time when German politics is moving once again back towards the right-wing CDU and tubthumping—tired of the slow, careful movements of the pragmatic socialist Schnecken that have formed previous coalitions—Grass’ novel-cum-memoir is an illuminating read: not so much of the current political climate, which has of course changed dramatically since then, but of the collective German psyche in the 20th Century. After leaping at one political movement and being stung to their psychic core, it somehow takes all of the German people’s collective restraint not to leap at another. Ultimately, Grass asks us again and again the question: why must we always learn from the hare, the big cats, the hunters and the gods of myth and legend… but never from the snail?
posted at: 15:48 |
path: / g / grass_guenter |
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The father, the stroke and the holy mess
Three Stories, by Alan Bennett
£7.99, Profile (2003)
(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Nov 11, 2005.)
A newly-invested vicar lets the funeral of a well-known masseur (both literal and euphemistic) get out of hand, as the congregation starts chipping in with their dirty stories. A middle-aged couple’s life is turned upside town, as their London flat is turned inside-out, swept clean by burglars and bringing on a seizure in the husband. A teacher’s father begins the long, quiet process of dying in his sleep while his family, and the ties within it, whirl and stretch and start to snap around him.
Each story in this anthology acts like a window into other people’s lives, and revel in the loose ends and commonplace, irksome complexities from which all of our own stories suffer. Each has also been fêted by the press, and rightly so: Bennett shows us what it’s like not just to be human, but to be other humans, to feel the itch of that person scratching over there and not just to perceive that they have an itch. And each story has its own individual arc and tempo: now pulling you along, now stopping to show you a detail, now involving you in the convolutions and complications.
Bennett sometimes dwells on details a little too much; a little gauchely, as the voices of the characters whose lives he is narrating suddenly leak out, and take over the telling from the otherwise disinterested voice of the author. But, as with his Talking Heads, such clumsiness could be just as studied as unintentional, and lends an endearing, conversational tone to what might otherwise be an unbelievable collision of circumstances. Ultimately every single word is engaged in the act of apologising for, indeed defending, people who any other writer might give up as inexcusable and indefensible; only the artist’s own giving-up, Bennett implies, has itself no defence.
posted at: 14:32 |
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