There has always been bawdy humour. The Miller’s Tale, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s late 14th century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, is replete with sexual innuendo and crude behaviour. More recently, we can think about the classic saucy seaside postcards of the early to mid-20th century featuring heaving bosoms, henpecked husbands and double entendres aplenty. Think too of the Carry On films of the 60s and 70s and the Confessions of a Window Cleaner franchise (funnily enough, Robin Asquith, who played the lead role in the Confessions films, also appeared in a 1972 “erotic comedy” version of The Canterbury Tales, containing abundant nudity, sex and slapstick; he evidently knew his oeuvre).
Another age in history that was known for its explosion of bawdy humour was the Restoration period. The Restoration, of course, was the 1660 reinstatement of the Stuart monarchy, after ten years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England which was characterised by a Puritan culture that amongst other things banned Christmas and the theatre. Buzzkill, much. The Restoration triggered an outpouring of creativity in the arts and a Renaissance in English drama throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Enter Restoration Comedy, and talk about a reaction to Puritanism: it went quite spectacularly the other way, with the new King Charles II actively encouraging sexually explicit language in plays.
The theatres were packed and there was no shortage of playwrights to keep them that way for a few years (the peak of Restoration comedy per se was really only the 1670s and again in the 1690s): prominent figures included John Dryden, George Etherege, William Davenant, Thomas Killigrew, and William Wycherley. Wycherley’s comedy The Country Wife (1675) is a case in point. Controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time, the title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of “country”. Even in our own times, this word rarely makes in on-screen.
The play turns on two indelicate plot devices: a seducer’s ploy of faking impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young “country wife”, with her discovery of the joys of town life, ooh-err missus. The scandalous deception and the frank language have for much of the play’s history kept it off the stage and out of print. It was only in 1924 that the play was staged once more; interestingly, itself a year and period that followed a period of deprivation, namely the Great War, which understandably led to a sense of devil-may-care enjoyment of freedoms. Although clearly a period piece, The Country Wife has been acclaimed for its linguistic energy and sharp social satire.
Another throwback to childhood memories this week: we’re going to be looking at the endlessly charming children’s novel, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Who isn’t fondly familiar with Grahame’s story of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad, and their adventures on the river and in the Wild Wood? I used to get mixed up between this and a sixties’ children’s TV show called Tales of the Riverbank, which was clearly influenced by The Wind in the Willows given that it featured anthropomorphised woodland creatures like Hammy Hamster and Roderick the Water Rat, messing about in boats (and voiced by a suitably “hammy” Johnny Morris).
The novel was based on bedtime stories told by Grahame to his disabled son, Alastair. Grahame had frequent boating holidays and on these he would write tales about characters that in time would become Toad, Mole, Ratty, and Badger. He lived in Cookham Dean in Berkshire and was inspired by the farmland, lanes and villages of the area and the woodlands of local Bisham Woods which would become the Wild Wood. In 1908, he took early retirement from his job at the Bank of England and moved with his wife and son to an old farmhouse in Blewbury. There, he used the stories he had told Alastair as a basis for the manuscript of The Wind in the Willows.
The Wind in the Willows, book cover
The plot, you will perhaps recall, begins with Mole abandoning his spring-cleaning of his hole in the ground to join Ratty the water vole on the bank of the river, where Ratty inducts him into the ways of the river. They visit Toad, the wealthy and jovial resident of Toad Hall whose obsession with the new-fangled motorcar gives Mole and Ratty much cause for concern due to Toad’s propensity to crash vehicles. Mole visits the Wild Wood, gets lost and then found by Ratty and the two are taken in by Badger, who, upon learning of Toad’s numerous car crashes, joins the two to stage an intervention. They place Toad under house arrest, but Toad escapes, steals a car, and ends up in gaol. So far, so Grand Theft Auto…
Toad escapes from prison and winds up at Ratty’s home, whereupon Ratty informs him that Toad Hall is being squatted by weasels, stoats and ferrets. Toad, Badger, Mole and Ratty invade Toad Hall and drive out the interlopers. Toad holds a banquet to celebrate, mends his former ways and they all live happily ever after. In addition to this main narrative, the book contains several diversionary tales featuring Mole and Ratty, such as their encounter with the god Pan in the chapter called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (which Pink Floyd would use as the title of their debut studio album).
Here’s an excerpt featuring Ratty and Mole during their first encounter with Badger and his very appealing home…
THEY waited patiently for what seemed a very long time, stamping in the snow to keep their feet warm. At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like someone walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down at heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that was exactly what it was.
There was the noise of a bolt shot back, and the door opened a few inches, enough to show a long snout and a pair of sleepy blinking eyes.
“Now, the very next time this happens,” said a gruff and suspicious voice, “I shall be exceedingly angry. Who is it this time, disturbing people on such a night? Speak up!”
“Oh, Badger,” cried the Rat, “let us in, please. It’s me, Rat, and my friend Mole, and we’ve lost our way in the snow.”
“What, Ratty, my dear little man!” exclaimed the Badger, in quite a different voice. “Come along in, both of you, at once. Why, you must be perished. Well I never! Lost in the snow! And in the Wild Wood, too, and at this time of night! But come in with you.”
The two animals tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get inside, and heard the door shut behind them with great joy and relief.
The Badger, who wore a long dressing-gown, and whose slippers were indeed very down at heel, carried a flat candlestick in his paw and had probably been on his way to bed when their summons sounded. He looked kindly down on them and patted both their heads. “This is not the sort of night for small animals to be out,” he said paternally. “I’m afraid you’ve been up to some of your pranks again, Ratty. But come along; come into the kitchen. There’s a first-rate fire there, and supper and everything.”
He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall; out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well—stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.
The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.
Camille Pissarro is the Impressionist who doesn’t quite get the same props these days as the usual crowd: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne et al. These names trip off the tongue, and justifiably so due to the indelible stamp they all made on the artistic endeavour of Impressionism, but Pissarro was the one that they all looked up to as the oldest member and “founder” of their collective group. It was Pissarro who really helped get things off the ground and up and running, so to speak, so let’s look at the interesting story of how that came to pass.
Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands). His father, a French national of Portuguese Jewish descent, had travelled to St Thomas to deal with the estate of a deceased uncle. He ended up staying, marrying his uncle’s widow and having four children with her. According to Jewish law you can’t go marrying your aunt so the family was ostracised, and the young Camille and his siblings were sent to school with the local indigenous kids rather than to the island’s Jewish school.
At age twelve, Camille was sent to boarding school in France, and returned to St Thomas with a love of art and a thorough grounding in drawing and painting. After working for this father for a few years, but being convinced by Danish artist Fritz Melbye that he had a rare talent, he left for Venezuela and took on painting as a full-time profession. At twenty-one, he moved to Paris, working as an assistant to Fritz’s brother Anton Melbye, and attending the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse.
At the beginning of this period Pissarro’s paintings were in accord with the standards of the Salon, but he soon felt restricted by those standards. He wanted to express the beauties of nature without adulteration. He began to leave the city and paint scenes in the countryside, capturing the daily reality of village life, and painting what he saw, without artifice or grandeur. This inevitably ruffled the feathers of the art world’s old guard who criticised his paintings as “vulgar”.
At the Académie Suisse, however, he met Monet and Cézanne, young artists whose own work was attracting similar criticism, and he sympathised with them and encouraged them. Eventually, other Refusés (Salon rejects) joined the group and in 1873 Pissarro helped establish a collective called the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs” which included fifteen artists…and Impressionism was born. Let’s look at a gallery of Pissarro’s works, with prominence given to his wonderful Jalais Hill, Pontoise which marks his transition into Impressionism.
Just two miles up the road from me, at 2 Darnley Road, West Park, is a fine old semi-detached Edwardian dwelling which bears a blue plaque declaring this as the one-time home of J R R Tolkien when he was Reader in English at Leeds University in the 1920s. This was some years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but it is still quite a thrill to know that the young Tolkien was studying so close to where I’m writing now. I discovered The Hobbit whilst at school and absolutely loved it, and I’ll never forget the book cover: it was this one here, that took a few scrolls to find amongst the myriad different versions!
The Hobbit
The Hobbit turned out to be a springboard to the much larger, grown-up, epic high fantasy novel that was The Lord of the Rings. What an amazing piece of work! It is a journey for the reader just as it is a journey for the characters. It is underpinned, of course, by an astonishing depth of scholarship on its author’s part. Tolkien studied etymology and philology, and, as a keen medievalist, produced, whilst still at Leeds and long before writing his books, A Middle English Vocabulary and the definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Also whilst at Leeds, Tolkien completed a translation of Beowulf, which was a powerful influence on his later Middle-earth “legendarium” (this was Tolkien’s own term for his body of fictionalised mythology that would inform The Lord of the Rings). He also studied the Prose Edda and Norse mythology, as well as the Finnish Kalevala and other Scandinavian mythic literature. Tolkien’s knowledge of the myriad legends and myths of the Middle Ages and earlier would give rise to the world of Middle-earth with its inhabitants of hobbits, men, elves, dwarves, wizards, orcs and trolls familiar to Tolkien readers of today.
The Lord of the Rings, 1st single-volume edition (1968)
As most people know (but here’s a brief summary anyway), the story revolves around the Dark Lord Sauron, who in an earlier age created the One Ring, allowing him to rule the other Rings of Power given to men, dwarves, and elves, in his campaign to conquer all of Middle-earth. From homely beginnings in the Shire, a hobbit land reminiscent of the English countryside, the story ranges across Middle-earth, following the quest to destroy the One Ring, seen mainly through the eyes of the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin. Aiding the hobbits are the wizard Gandalf, the men Aragorn and Boromir, the elf Legolas, and the dwarf Gimli, who unite as the Company of the Ring in order to rally the Free Peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron’s armies and give Frodo a chance to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.
Here’s an excerpt from the earlier stages of the story (in Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring), when the hobbits have recently left their beloved Shire behind and ventured beyond to the town of Bree where they stay overnight in the Prancing Pony inn, and meet Aragorn (Strider) for the first time. I choose it because it it was the first time (though not the last) of experiencing a real thrill whilst reading it: that gradual transition from a sense of foreboding about this dark stranger in the corner to the realisation that Strider was in fact an ally, and a safe pair of hands at that!
Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weatherbeaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.
‘Who is that?’ Frodo asked, when he got a chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. ‘I don’t think you introduced him?’
‘Him?’ said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eye without turning his head. ‘I don’t rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk – Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. He was in and out pretty often last spring; but I haven’t seen him about lately. What his right name is I’ve never heard: but he’s known round here as Strider. Goes about at a great pace on his long shanks; though he don’t tell nobody what cause he has to hurry. But there’s no accounting for East and West, as we say in Bree, meaning the Rangers and the Shire-folk, begging your pardon. Funny you should ask about him.’ But at that moment Mr. Butterbur was called away by a demand for more ale and his last remark remained unexplained.
Frodo found that Strider was now looking at him, as if he had heard or guessed all that had been said. Presently, with a wave of his hand and a nod, he invited Frodo to come over and sit by him. As Frodo drew near he threw back his hood, showing a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.
‘I am called Strider,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Master – Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.’
‘He did,’ said Frodo stiffly. He felt far from comfortable under the stare of those keen eyes.
‘Well, Master Underhill,’ said Strider, ‘if I were you, I should stop your young friends from talking too much. Drink, fire, and chance-meeting are pleasant enough, but, well this isn’t the Shire. There are queer folk about. Though I say it as shouldn’t, you may think,’ he added with a wry smile, seeing Frodo’s glance. ‘And there have been even stranger travellers through Bree lately,’ he went on, watching Frodo’s face.
Frodo returned his gaze but said nothing; and Strider made no further sign. His attention seemed suddenly to be fixed on Pippin. To his alarm Frodo became aware that the ridiculous young Took, encouraged by his success with the fat Mayor of Michel Delving, was now actually giving a comic account of Bilbo’s farewell party. He was already giving an imitation of the Speech, and was drawing near to the astonishing Disappearance.
Frodo was annoyed. It was a harmless enough tale for most of the local hobbits, no doubt: just a funny story about those funny people away beyond the River; but some (old Butterbur, for instance) knew a thing or two, and had probably heard rumours long ago about Bilbo’s vanishing. It would bring the name of Baggins to their minds, especially if there had been inquiries in Bree after that name. Frodo fidgeted, wondering what to do. Pippin was evidently much enjoying the attention he was getting, and had become quite forgetful of their danger. Frodo had a sudden fear that in his present mood he might even mention the Ring; and that might well be disastrous.
‘You had better do something quick!’ whispered Strider in his ear.
When it comes to literature as the subject of this blog – that is, books, generally – it can be taken as read that I have actually read said books. And whilst that is normally the case, my integrity compels me to admit that I never finished today’s subject, Miguel de Cervantes’ epic masterpiece, Don Quixote. I think I got about a quarter of the way through before surrender, many years ago now. It’s a long, dense book and really, there are better things to do than wade through early 17th century Spanish novels. Nonetheless, Don Quixote remains an important piece of work worthy of inspection.
For one thing, Don Quixote (the full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha), originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is considered a founding work of Western literature and is often said to be the first modern novel. Of course, the claim to be ‘first novel’ is inevitably going to be contentious, since much depends on the definition of the word ‘novel’. Vying for that title are everything from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and even Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (c. 1485), but we needn’t worry about that now. All we need to know is that Don Quixote is one of the most translated and best-selling books of all time, and that it has bequeathed to the lexicon the word ‘quixotic’ and the phrase ‘tilting at windmills’.
The plot revolves around the adventures of a hidalgo from La Mancha who reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight-errant himself under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha, and sets out with his squire, Sancho Panza, to save his lady love Dulcinea del Toboso, in the name of chivalry and all that is noble and good. It’s clear that Don Quixote has essentially lost his mind and is living a fantasy life, and whilst in his mind we know that he is living out an epic knightly story of honour and glory, we are seeing a fantasist being humoured, ignored, or attacked by all he encounters.
The adventures begin with the famous windmill scene, in which Don Quixote mistakes a group of windmills for ferocious giants and charges at them, armed with a lance, on his old horse Rocinante. Whilst Sancho Panza tries to ground him in reality, it is a lost cause: even when Don Quixote realises that they are indeed windmills, he claims that a magician must have transformed the giants. ‘Tilting at windmills’ has become synonymous with wasting time and energy on the wrong targets or taking on hopelessly lost causes or imaginary foes. Here’s the relevant excerpt, and you have to admire Don Quixote for the courage of his conviction! It’s funny, and I might just have to go back and finish the last three-quarters of the book some time.
Just then, they discovered thirty or forty windmills in that plain. And as soon as don Quixote saw them, he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have ever hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.”
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those that you see over there,” responded his master, “with the long arms—some of them almost two leagues long.”
“Look, your grace,” responded Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants—they’re windmills; and what seems to be arms are the sails that rotate the millstone when they’re turned by the wind.”
“It seems to me,” responded don Quixote, “that you aren’t well-versed in adventures—they are giants; and if you’re afraid, get away from here and start praying while I go into fierce and unequal battle with them.”
And saying this, he spurred his horse Rocinante without heeding what his squire Sancho was shouting to him, that he was attacking windmills and not giants. But he was so certain they were giants that he paid no attention to his squire Sancho’s shouts, nor did he see what they were, even though he was very close. Rather, he went on shouting: “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”
At this point, the wind increased a bit and the large sails began to move, which don Quixote observed and said: “Even though you wave more arms than Briaræus, you’ll have to answer to me.”
When he said this—and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, asking her to aid him in that peril, well-covered by his shield, with his lance on the lance rest —he attacked at Rocinante’s full gallop and assailed the first windmill he came to. He gave a thrust into the sail with his lance just as a rush of air accelerated it with such fury that it broke the lance to bits, taking the horse and knight with it, and tossed him rolling onto the ground, very battered.
Sancho went as fast as his donkey could take him to help his master, and when he got there, he saw that don Quixote couldn’t stir—such was the result of Rocinante’s landing on top of him. “God help us,” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell you to watch what you were doing; that they were just windmills, and that only a person who had windmills in his head could fail to realize it?”
“Keep still, Sancho, my friend,” responded don Quixote. “Things associated with war, more than others, are subject to continual change. Moreover, I believe—and it’s true—that the sage Frestón—he who robbed me of my library—has changed these giants into windmills to take away the glory of my having conquered them, such is the enmity he bears me. But in the long run, his evil cunning will have little power over the might of my sword.”
I’m a big fan of film noir, but what exactly is film noir? Well, it’s a genre or style, and it was coined in the twenties by French film critics describing Hollywood movies that they saw as dark and pessimistic, hence “black cinema” or “film noir”. Film noir movies tend to be thrillers or detective movies with certain common elements such as an anti-hero protagonist, a femme fatale (there go the French again), some tight, snappy dialogue, high-contrast cinematography, and a general sense of disillusionment or cynicism (as opposed to the idealism and happy endings of many an early Hollywood movie). What better example of film noir is there than Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep? (Clue: there probably isn’t one).
Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel about blackmail and murder, we have Humphrey Bogart as the anti-hero, private detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall as the smouldering seductress, Vivian Rutledge. Tight dialogue comes courtesy of William Faulkner (as an aside, Faulkner is better known as one of America’s greatest novelists – see The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!) who co-wrote the screenplay. The cinematography comes from the great auteur Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, To Have and Have Not, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo et al).
The Big Sleep was released by Warner Bros on 31st August 1946, and was such a commercial success that two more “Bogie and Bacall” films were quickly made: Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). The sexual chemistry between the newly-married Bogart and Bacall is famously electric, and the overall atmosphere is sultry and sumptuous. I have watched it at least twice and whilst I never really figured out what’s going on in its confusing plot, I never really cared, as I wasn’t there for the plot. I was there for Bogie and Bacall. Let’s watch Marlowe and Vivian’s first meeting, in which the verbal jousting sets the temperature for the rest of the movie.
J D Salinger (1919–2010) was quite the enigma. Having created one of the Great American Novels in The Catcher In The Rye in 1951, he never published another full-length novel and gradually withdrew from society. Within two years of the publication of Catcher, Salinger had moved from New York to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire, and was rarely seen out and about. In the role of “reclusive writer”, he gives Thomas Pynchon a run for his money (Pynchon, prolific and still-living novelist known for Gravity’s Rainbow amongst others, is so reclusive that no-one knows where he lives and there aren’t any pictures of him in the public domain from any time after about 1955). Salinger didn’t stop writing however: it is rumoured that he wrote up to fifteen novels…but just didn’t publish them!
The Catcher in the Rye was originally intended for adults, but of course has since been celebrated as a novel for adolescents due to its themes of angst and alienation, and its icon of teenage rebellion, Holden Caulfield. 16-year-old Holden has been expelled from prep school and wanders New York City, grappling with feelings about the superficiality of adult society (its “phoniness”), and embodying for the reader themes of innocence, identity, sex, and depression. His journey takes in a number of awkward altercations and misadventures with prostitutes and pimps and other exemplars of an underbelly of society that does nothing to disabuse him of his suspicions of the adult world.
The Catcher In The Rye, First Edition
Heartily sick of the harsh realities of growing up, Holden sneaks back into his parents’ home while they are out and wakes his little sister, Phoebe. Although she is happy to see him, Phoebe is annoyed that he’s aimlessly ruining his life. Isn’t there anything he cares about? It turns out that there is: Holden shares a fantasy, which he seems to have cooked up based on a literal interpretation of some lines in Robert Burns’s Comin’ Through the Rye (“when a body catch a body, comin’ through the rye”). There is a field of rye through which children are running dangerously towards a cliff, and Holden is there to catch them before they fall off. This seems to point towards a compassionate streak that his parents and teachers have hitherto failed to uncover. Although the novel leaves his future uncertain, who knows, perhaps some inchoate purpose in life is being hinted at?
Meanwhile, here is a flavour of the narrator’s dialogue and you can feel (perhaps remember?) the teenage disdain…
I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony—I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off—they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.
The history of early twentieth century African-American vocal ensembles is a rich one: the highly successful Mills Brothers inspired a large number of singing groups in the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Using only their voices and sometimes some sparse instrumentation, these groups combined jazz, pop, and gospel to produce music that anticipated the rise of R&B, rock ‘n roll, and doo-wop in the 1950s. Such groups as the Spirits of Rhythm, the Golden Gate Quartet, the Four Vagabonds, Cats and the Fiddle, the Ravens, and the Ink Spots were all pioneers and integral parts of musical history.
The Ink Spots gained international fame in the 1930s and 1940s and were widely accepted in both the white and black communities. They had started out in 1934 as a group singing comedy jive songs in the manner of Fats Waller or Cab Calloway, but when their original tenor singer Jerry Daniels left the group, his replacement Bill Kenny would transform them into a seriously melodic vocal harmony group that would sell millions of records. It’s no exaggeration to say that every singer who sang a ballad in the 1950s and early sixties was influenced by the Ink Spots.
If I Didn’t Care was the record that defined their trademark sound. Written by Jack Lawrence, it is the perfect showcase for the Ink Spots’ deliciously warm harmonies. The angel voices of Bill Kenny and bandmates Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Orville Jones, harmonise together like honey. Check them out here.
The art world didn’t used to be quite sure what to do with an artist who hadn’t come up through the ranks in the conventional manner, by studying at somewhere like the Royal Academy of Arts or one of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts. They certainly didn’t know what to do with Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) who only started painting in his early forties, was completely self-taught, and had previously been earning his living as a tax collector (hence his later nickname Le Douanier). His style, too, was not treated kindly by critics – although it would later be referred to as primitivism or Naïve art, Rousseau’s paintings had a childlike simplicity and frankness about them that were widely disparaged by the highbrows.
Picasso, though, knew a natural born artistic genius when he saw one; when he happened upon one of Rousseau’s paintings being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over, he immediately sought out and met Rousseau. Later he would host a banquet in Rousseau’s honour which would become famous as a notable social event due to the timely presence of so many artists and literary figures from the time (Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Gertrude Stein et al).
Rousseau painted a lot of jungle scenes, even though he never visited a jungle nor even left France. Here’s a gallery of Rousseau’s art that showcases his distinct style, with appealing simple shapes and blocks of colour.
The Sleeping Gypsy (French: La Bohémienne endormie) is probably Rousseau’s most famous painting. Painted in 1897, it is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. Rousseau’s own description is as good as any:
“A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic. The scene is set in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental costume.”
It is a bewitching image; The Sleeping Gypsy is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is housed right next to Vincent van Gogh’s famous The Starry Night. That’s not a bad pairing!
I don’t often go in for biographies or autobiographies and am usually found reading material by people rather than about people (though I suppose biographies are also by people, but you know what I mean). However, it’s a genre as old as writing itself. In the 1st century CE, Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives in which he pairs up and writes about famous Greeks and Romans that seem to have an equivalence e.g. the orators Demosthenes (Greek) and Cicero (Roman). In the 3rd century, Diogenes Laërtius was writing his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers about all the known Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus. In the 16th century, Georgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects covering Renaissance artists from Cimabue to Bronzino. Incidentally, reading these three books is a good way to acquire a pretty comprehensive classical education!
What these biographies have in common is that they are essentially sketches; they write potted histories of multiple people. When it comes to full-blown biography about one individual, however, one book stands out as an early landmark of the genre and that is James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), about English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. It enjoys a reputation as being one of the greatest biographies ever written, and it is valued as an important source of information not just about Johnson but his times.
Samuel Johnson was a celebrated character in 18th century London, admired for his intellect and pithy one-liners (a bit like Oscar Wilde or Stephen Fry in different ages) and famed for his reputation in literary criticism and lexicography in the form of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was Johnson who famously said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. And it was Johnson also who provided a memorable response to the new, monist, idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, which conjectured that all that exists – including “matter” — could be reduced to one ontological fundamental, namely “mind”. When asked, whilst out for a walk, what he thought about this idea, Johnson is said to have kicked a stone with a contemptuous “I refute it thus!”.
In 1763, travelling Scottish lawyer James Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of a friend of Johnson’s and they quickly became friends. In the ensuing years they spent a lot of time together in long conversations whilst on walking holidays in places like the Hebrides. Boswell was a diligent keeper of journals and thoroughly recorded his day-to-day experiences, and it was on this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson’s life. Johnson commented on Boswell’s excessive note-taking: “One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me!”.
Boswell first published his account of their walking holiday The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786, published after Johnson’s death, and this proved to be a decent trial run of his biographical method for when he took on his Life of Johnson. With the success of the Journal, Boswell started working on the “vast treasure of his conversations at different times” that he recorded in his journals. His goal was to recreate Johnson’s “life in scenes”, and this he did spectacularly well, with the first edition published in 1791.
James Boswell by George WillisonSamuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds
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