Sunday Night is... Noel Coward

Coward in 1955 on American TV absolutely ripping through 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen'. The man is just too too brilliant, dear boy. His timing is out of this world. 'Same native, pay no attention...'

*

On Friday to see the UEA students performing Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods. They do a rather good job with some smart direction, right down to the risqué café scene that begins and occupies most of the second part after the interval. Horváth was terrified of thunderstorms and was killed by a falling branch on the Champs d'Elysée in the middle of a thunderstorm. He was thirty-six. Like all Hungarians he was vastly productive but he wrote in German. This was the Christopher Hampton translation.

It's as much cabaret as play, very dark and very acid, somewhere between Brecht, Wedekind and a more petit bourgeois Joseph Roth, an original variation on the idea of the 'Folk Play' or Volksstuck. It's the '30s. The Austrians are all busy giving Nazi salutes. They are all hypocrites. They are pretty well all decadent. Some are downright evil. Some are faintly likeable. But they sing throughout. The plot is essentially a moral melodrama, but it's the vignettes that carry the pace.

I wish it were a less timely piece.

Inflatable

Now’s the time for inflatable Santas and sledges
Sing holly, sing brolly
For curtains of lightbulbs dripping from lodges and ledges
Sing dilly sing dolly
Sing melancholy

For buffoons in big boots, for belly-laughs in the bar
Sing holly, sing brolly
For a bunch of wise lads bending over the boobs in The Star
Sing dilly sing dolly
Sing melancholy

For ladettes in high heels tottering drunk down the cobbles
Sing holly, sing brolly
For midriff and miniskirt, for minces and winces and wobbles
Sing dilly sing dolly
Sing melancholy

For time and for tide, for the taxi that’s waiting on no-one
Sing holly, sing brolly
For sales and for gales and for so on and so on and so on…
Sing dilly sing dolly
Sing melancholy

For so on and so on and so on and so on and so on
Sing dilly
Sing dolly
Sing holly
Sing brolly
Sing it

Sing melancholy.

And so on...

Hungarian Fascists in London

Hungarian neo-fascist party, Jobbik, has set up an office in London tying in with the BNP. Must be anticipating rich pickings and trawling for resident Hungarian support.

[Jobbik] already has links with Mr Griffin, who has previously met its representatives. Jobbik has also joined Mr Griffin’s European alliance, which is seeking the support of seven EU parties to create a pan-European group and claim about £360,000 a year in taxpayer funding.

This from The Times up from HP.




Troops of the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard)/

The leader of Jobbik, Gábor Vona, is also the leader of the banned but still operating Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard) militia, Jobbik’s uniformed wing.

No Comment / Dead Souls

Corus story

Lloyds story

RBS story

I think we can come to a compromise on this, can't we? The bankers could forgo their million-pound bonuses in return for the services of the unemployed steelworkers as subsistence labour for, say, twenty years. Plenty of uses envisaged: security force, private army, dead souls á la Gogol (a kind of toxic debt)*, rickshaw service, organ donors, paving stones, water features...

A work force is infinitely adaptable. Just needs a little imagination.

The Season of Good Will is upon us.




*'In the Russian Empire before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, and could be bought, sold, or mortgaged against, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the measure word "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs". The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers.'

The disadvantage of being behovely

I suspect I might have been born aged forty-two, which is, as the whole world knows, the answer to life, the universe and everything. Having arrived in England at the age of eight I quickly regressed to about age seven but eventually found my way back to forty-two. At sixty-one I am forty-two even now as I write this with my forty-two year old fingers.

Perhaps we all home in on an age, show signs of it before we get there, and thenceforth remain there until something breaks. I'd like to say I was for ever twenty-nine or even thirty-six but the truth, I feel, is closer to forty-two. Still, that's nineteen years younger than sixty-one so I don't complain.

I imagine forty-two because my parents told me I had the manners of a wise old man as an infant, weighing things up and pronouncing perceptively on matters such as Hungarian foreign policy, the rate of wheat production and on broad philosophical questions, such as 'Which way is up?' A wise old man as an infant can't be older than forty-two. Any older would be plain ridiculous.

I don't think I had any great desire to be a child. I don't remember any such desire. For that reason I came to pop music rather late by modern standards, surfing in on the '60s and firmly established on the beach by the time it got to the '70s. So, by the time Bowie came around, for instance, I already felt out of the pop ambience. Pop was something that happened in late childhood, aka adolescence. It was for kids. I was not a kid. Kiddishness I have slowly recovered in my retrospective forty-two year old fashion. Much like dancing, in fact.

But then I also hated being of the crowd. The latest books, the latest music. I resisted it for being the latest. If it was good it was going to be good after it was no longer the latest. I wanted detachment. Stevie Smith once said she never read anything less than two-hundred years old. She exaggerated but the idea was quite appealing in its mad way. I wanted to discover things entirely for myself then make some kind of choice about it without the tide of opinion washing in one ear and out the other.

Weird, eh?

This reflection was triggered by listening - actually listening - to Morrissey on Desert Island Discs this morning. I hadn't paid him great attention in the '80s. He was clearly interesting but somehow it wasn't quite behovely to pretend to be of that pack. This despite the fact that Morrissey himself is only eleven years younger than me.

He sounded interesting on the programme, very self-conscious, very droll, confident, a touch confrontational, intelligent, an original. He clearly valued words-as-lyrics, at one point likening Lou Reed to W.H. Auden. Well, maybe.

I'll listen now.

Closure

I rarely disagree with Norm, but I'm not sure about his post titled Straw Lerman regarding Antony Lerman's view of the Demjanjuk trial. It begins:

Talk about inventing an argument so that you've got something to write to the contrary. Antony Lerman has found a reason for worrying about the Demjanjuk trial. It's that the trial could be 'ratcheting up expectations of some final closure'. Lerman explains:

This, for me, is the major flaw in the process – encouraging people to believe that we have come to the end of dealing with the consequences of the Holocaust. As if history is now done and dusted. Or that closing the door on the last trial makes further reckoning with the past impossible. The hunt for Nazi war criminals, which always attracts huge international attention, has greatly contributed to this distortion of reality. It reduces our image of the Holocaust to the unspeakable acts of the evil criminal, who is then tracked down, exposed and put on trial so that a final reckoning can take place in a public, adversarial confrontation with the memories of Holocaust survivors.

It may satisfy some visceral need to see the individual as the repository of evil, a symbol of the horrors, who is then removed from society, but it's too neat. All the complexities of the Demjanjuk case prove that.

I don't like to overstate things, but what useless verbiage that is. To try an alleged participant in a genocide that killed millions and still stands as a symbol of modern-day barbarism in no way implies expectation of final closure with the trial, or supports a belief that the consequences of that epochal horror will be concluded by it...

I wish Norm were right but my hunch is that the Denjanjuk trial will be seen by many as a closure of sorts. After all there are a great many people who actively want a closure, if only because lack of closure implies an obligation.

Thank God we can forget about that lot then, they think. And now they can stop whining about it too. And using it as an excuse.

Haven't people always done this and is this not why closures are suspect? There are few, if any, closures of memory or the imagination. but there are certainly closures of the will.

When disaster strikes someone, or indeed a people, there is action. Some help, some weep, some stay quiet and some rejoice. Schadenfreude is not an uncommon feeling. Being obliged to feel guilty for even a smidgeon of it, is a burden and nobody likes carrying a burden. Lay it down!

The disaster having happened and the bodies having been counted, the next stage is documentation. Who are the dead? Where are they? Who did it? How? Where are the survivors? What will become of them? This produces evidence, trials, and political solutions.

The next stage is personal account as memoir. I was there, I experienced it, this is what it was like as narrative. This is my story. Forming a story is already a modification that enlarges some facts and shrinks others. Some facts it forgets altogether. Stories follow certain archetypal patterns, so do these stories.

The stage after that is straight literature. Fiction. A certain distance is required for all art. The remarkable thing about, say, Radnóti's last poems is that he could be both there on the death march and still be elsewhere in his mind. He could maintain distance. But that is poetry, which is not exactly fiction. Constructing a novel in which the documented takes second place to the invented moves the event still further off. Survivors might find such fictionalised accounts disturbing. Though they themselves may, for sanity's sake, have started to see their experiences on a fictional plane. Art is, after all, an attempt at sanity, at giving the shock of events form and meaning.

The next stage is cliché, commonplace, myth: the lay figure. Ken Livingstone accusing a doorstepping reporter of being 'a concentration camp guard'. I wasn't expecting The Spanish Inquisition! was the Python joke. What was the Inquisition? Three absurd cardinals in a living room. I wasn't expecting the Holocaust! would not have worked then, but give it twenty years and, who knows?

Myth-cliché is the last stage before events break up altogether.

Then, as myth becomes commonplace and, eventually a joke, the original event is questioned. The questions become respectable. So we get revision. Perhaps the whole thing never happened like that. Perhaps the bad people weren't all that bad, nor the innocent so innocent.

That is the stage we are at with Twelve Jewish Children and with the acceptance of Islamic anti-Semitism. It never happened. They are all liars. They capitalise on it. They are all headcases. They deserved it.

So now the last of the last real characters in the documentary, of the evidential stage, is brought to trial. Rightly brought to trial, in my opinion, because it is the trial and not the sentence that matters here.

And no, it is not a closure, but it is an excuse for closure. And that is all some people need.

Now at last will you shut up! they'll hiss. Look, there's nothing there. Perhaps there never was. Schadenfreude is not an uncommon feeling. Being obliged to feel guilty, for even a smidgeon of it, was a burden and nobody liked carrying a burden. Lay it down!

Márai: a perfectly dressed ghost,

Judit, the abjectly poor beautiful peasant girl, turned maid, turned wife of the son of a rich industrialist from whom she separated before the war, is in Rome in 1949 or so, with her jazz drummer lover, having left Hungary after the communist take over. It is night, almost dawn, and she recalls the chaotic days after the siege of Budapest. All the bridges have been blown up. Th city is a smoking ruin from which the survivors emerge. A hastily constructed temporary bridge spans the Danube and there are long queues of ragged filthy people either side waiting to cross from one side to the other. As she is crossing she spots her ex-husband on the other side and runs to meet him.


...I couldn’t believe my eyes. You know who stood in front of me on that improvised bridge among queues that stretched into the far distance, some ten or twenty thousand people in the smoky, sooty town where there were few houses left unmarked by shell or bullet holes? There was hardly an unbroken window anywhere. There was no traffic, no policeman, no law, nothing, a place where people dressed like beggars even when there was no need to, deliberately looking wretched, ancient and penniless, growing wild beards, stumbling about in rags to awaken others’ pity. Grand ladies carried sacks and everyone had a back pack like village brats, idle itinerants…. My husband stood in front me. It was the same man I hurt seven years ago. Exactly the same, the man who, when he understood that I was not his lover, not even his wife but his enemy, came to me one afternoon, smiled and quietly said:

- I think it might be best for us to separate.

He always started sentences that way when he wanted to say something very important: ‘I think…’. Or, ‘I imagine…’ He never spoke his mind directly, never hit you with it in the eye. When my father could take no more he would exclaim: ‘Godammit!...’ And then he would hit me. But my husband, whenever he couldn’t bear something, courteously opened a little door each time, as if what he were saying was merely something to consider, a by-the-way thought, in the course of which the true import or damage hidden in what he said could slip by you. He learned this in England, in the school where he studied. Another favourite phrase of his was: ‘I’m afraid that...’. One evening, for example, he turned to me and said, ‘I’m afraid my mother is dying’....


What strikes her is how beautifully he is still dressed,


...Any ordinary person might imagine that a man and woman might exchange a few words on meeting by the Danube, among the ruins of Budapest, after the siege… They might, for example, start by establishing the fact that both are still alive, don’t you think? “I’m afraid’ or ‘I think’ – one could imagine that, But my husband’s mind was elsewhere, so we just sat in front of the cave opposite the mineral springs and stared at each other.

I stared pretty hard, as you can imagine and I started to tremble. It was like being in a dream: the fog and the reality, both at once.

You know I am not any kind of ninny, darling. Nor am I a sentimental little tramp who starts bawling when she feels on edge or when she’s moved by a farewell. The reason I was trembling was because the man sitting beside me, opposite the vast tomb that the whole city had become, was not a human being, but a ghost.

Sometimes others only persist in dreams. Only dreams- dreams more effective than formaldehyde - can preserve apparitions like my husband as he seemed to me at that moment. Just imagine! His clothes were not ragged! I can’t remember precisely but I think he was wearing the same charcoal grey double-breasted suit I last saw him in, that he wore when he told me to my face, ‘I think it might be best for us to separate.’ I couldn’t be sure about the suit because he had many others like it… two or three, single-breasted, double-breasted… but in any case the same cut, the same material and produced by the very same tailor who had made his father’s suits.

Even on a morning like this he was wearing a clean shirt, a pale-cream lawn shirt and a dark grey tie. His shoes were black and double-soled. They looked brand new, though I have no idea how he could have crossed that dusty bridge without a speck of dust sticking to them. I was, of course, perfectly aware that the shoes were not new and that they only looked that way because they’d hardly been worn, for after all he had a dozen like them in his shoe-cupboard… I had seen enough of his shoes on the hall seat when it was I who cleaned those fine leather objects. Now there he was, wearing them.

They talk about things being fresh out of the outfitter’s box. But this was not only a box but a mass grave out of which people had climbed. It was the ditch out of which he himself had climbed. There was not a crease on the suit. His light beige gabardine raincoat - Made in England - was casually draped across his arm, very roomy, almost obscenely comfortable as I remember because it was I who had unwrapped the package from London when it first arrived… Much later I myself passed the shop in London from which the coat had been purchased, there in the window among other things… It was the raincoat he was still wearing at that very moment, thrown across his arm in an almost careless fashion now, because it was a mild end-of-winter afternoon.

He wore no gloves, of course, because he only put them on in the very depths of winter when it was freezing. So I looked at his hands too – they were white and clean, his nails so unobtrusively manicured you’d think they’d never seen a pair of scissors… That was him all over.

You know what was the strangest thing? When you put him in with that crowd of filthy, muddy, grimy, ragged people creeping over the bridge, his presence was practically incendiary. And yet he was almost invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone from among the crowd came over, took him by the lapels and shook and poked him, just to check that he was real…Imagine what would happen in the French Revolution, in those months of the Terror, when aristocrats were being hunted all over Paris the way children hunt sparrows with catapults, if an elderly nobleman appeared on the street in lilac frockcoat and powdered wig, amiably waving at carts filled with fellow counts and earls of his class on their way to the scaffold. There would be nothing between him and my husband – each as spectacular as the other. He was mysteriously different from the toiling throng around him, as if he had emerged not from one of the many bombed-out houses but from an invisible theatre, a piece of period drama for which he was appropriately fitted by the dresser. It was an old part in an old play, the kind that was never going to be put on now.


*

It was the end of the story for members of his class. They had no role in the new regime.

It is the persistence of class ethos that Márai is getting at and in fact admiring. The quiet pride in maintaining appearance and appearances. He himself was far more like the husband than the maid / wife, of course.