Wednesday 6 November 2024

Review: Munster Village by Mary Hamilton


Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village can be found in a collection called ‘Mothers of the Novel’ that was published in the ‘80s. I had a mixed bag with my anthology of women’s amatory tales of the early eighteenth century but these were later, from the 1770s to the 1830s, with Munster Village being written in 1778.

It’s a remarkably inconsistent book and, in its brief 150 pages lurches in tone, style and purpose.

It starts off with a fairly engaging description of an ambitious Lord who is disappointed in his political endeavours and responds by sulking. He has two children who are being raised by guardians far more moral than he. His son’s guardian is raising the boy along with his own daughter and of course the son of the Lord loves the daughter, so does the Lord. His son runs off with the woman they both love and he disowns him.

The couple live long enough to have a son and daughter of their own, then the Lord dies, his son dies and the wife dies - leaving the estate to the daughter, Lady Frances, who takes the children in.

All these shenanigans only really exist to get the estate of Munster Village into Lady Frances’s care so she can turn it into an arts and crafts utopia. There are workshops, a garden by Capability Brown and, at the centre, a grand library. Women are not excluded from this educational Eden, being given places to learn, to create and to grow. Lady Frances also takes in women who have been ill-treated by their husbands and provides them with a safe respite. One of these women says a line I think I’ve read quoted somewhere else, “I hate your wise ones, there is no opinion so absurd but it hadn’t been mentioned by some philosopher.” Though I’m not sure where I would have heard it before.

The majority of the first volume is taken up with describing this paradise, but not really how it works. We learn how it is laid out, are often told that it is beautiful and useful, and we also find out that the care taken in planning the place out increases its yield - but we don’t really get a clear picture of life there. We do learn that she uses buffaloes to drive her ploughs though - as they are stronger than oxen.

Then, when the young man comes of age, there’s a grand presentation where she gives Munster Village to him and finds herself free to marry Lord Darnley, a man she has long loved but felt she couldn’t marry until she has fulfilled her duties to niece and nephew.

In the second volume, it’s revealed the nephew is very upset. He’s fallen in love with two unattainable women and can’t decide which he loves, or if he can get any. The daughter goes to London where she assesses her picks of husband and writes to her friend. These letters are the liveliest parts of the book where she and her friend laugh at an old lady who “has more diseases than even Galen knows of, and a cough that relieves he of teeth”, or at a stupid lady who “seems to be a person created, rather to fill up a vacuum in nature than perform any good in it.” She’s also shocked at the fashionable women’s need to kneel in their sedan chairs because there’s no room for their enormous wigs otherwise.

There then follows a vast succession of interrelated amatory tales, whole novels worth of plot told in a few pages. Some about cruel fathers, others about brigands, one about the cruelty of being a galley slave - a plight described in detail (including the detail that the slaves row completely naked, wouldn’t that chafe?). All these events transpire so our young people and all their friends can be happily matched by the end of the book. 

The book ends with a masque give to celebrate Frances’s birthday, where figures from history all come forward to tell their stories and to praise the wisdom of Lady Frances. There’s a huge, long part that cribs off Ossian, making something more turgid than Ossian - Ossian fan-fic.

Then the book ends.

This is such a strange and inconsistent book. Is it a philosophical description of a utopia? A political novel? A series of amatory tales? Sometimes it’ll drag for pages, such as the masque and description of the layout of the village and sometimes it’ll cram series worth of events in a few paragraphs. The strangest element is how the book is mostly told in the past tense but will have the occasional sentence or paragraph in the present tense. All of this means that a slim book feels interminably long. While there were plenty of interesting and/or entertaining elements to pluck out the book, it barely holds together as one piece. I look forward to more luck with the next book of the series I read. 



Wednesday 30 October 2024

A List of Everything I Reviewed

I reviewed theatre in London for just over a year. In that time I wrote 58 reviews, which averaged out about one a week. In truth, the volume of plays came in waves.

It started with a surreal cabaret that involved cross-dressing Rasputin with a wooly willy and ended in the joke "Campanology is a great way to hang out at the weekend with big dongs."

Highs along the way included a tight horror story, a moving tale of a piano, a court masque and a three person Dickens show.

Low points included a repeated question about a mouse, a badly rehearsed thing in a tower block and tiring relationship drama with not enough aliens. 

Now I am a long way away from the bright(ish) lights and pub backrooms and, to be honest, I miss it a little. However, I am in a play - and every time I sat to review a piece of theatre, I had a yearning to be in one. 

However, for my own use more than anything else, here is a clickable list of everything I reviewed in that time. 


The play I am in is One Man, Two Guvnors at the Caxton Theatre. I play one of the guvnors, Stanley Stubbers, and you can find more about that here.









Wednesday 23 October 2024

Was Christopher Smart mad?


Whether Christopher Smart was and is a question that frequently occurs when talking about him and his work. Moira Dearnley, in her analysis of his poetry, can’t help but opine that he was clearly mad and it oozes all over his poetry. Clement Hawes argues that there is a specific manic rhetoric style that Smart adopts that is not necessarily an indiction of mania itself. Chris Mounsey is convinced that Smart’s reputation and incarceration for madness was a concerted scheme by Newbery.


In many ways, it’s a useless question because the definition of madness is so nebulous. The fact that what passed as professionals at the time assessed Smart, treated him and then kicked him out as incurable means that under the wibbly standards of the time, he was mad - madness being a display of beliefs and behaviours deemed irrational by the society at the time. 


Yet, did Christopher Smart suffer from what we would call a mental illness today?


Again, it’s something of a fool’s question, Smart didn’t have the cultural or mental apparatus to understand the mind the way we do. Even if he suffered the same experiences or chemical imbalances of a modern mental health patient, his conception of the mind’s workings would have been so different that a modern diagnosis would have been pointless to him. That’s beside the fact that we only have glimpses of Smart, both in other people’s record and his own. He’s simply not around to answer the kinds of questions that would lead to a certain answer.


This doesn’t stop his contemporaries being analysed and diagnosed though. Samuel Johnson has long been a poster boy for depression, it’s generally accepted as having a form of Tourette’s Disease and OCD UK have adopted him also. To be fair, Samuel Johnson was one of the most written about people of his era and so there is a greater wealth of evidence - but there’s still an element of hurling a small light down a deep well.


All those caveats aside, I’m quite convinced that Christopher Smart did suffer from a mental illness which we recognise and classify today, Bipolar Disorder.


The first indication of this is a point he makes in Jubilate Agno, “For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.”


But there are a number of other hints that point in that direction.


Smart was a known drunkard in an age of drunkenness. Johnson quips about him walking to the pub but being carried back. In his years as student, and even as fellow, he was known for carousing in the pubs. His actual admittance to St Luke’s Madhouse was for alcoholism and it was generally said that his later ‘attacks’ of prayer were often after drinking sessions. Substance abuse is often a sign of various mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, with the person going on excessive binges whilst manic and self-medicating with alcohol when depressed.


There’s also the claim (that I still can’t find the source of) that Smart was addicted to hartshorn, an ammonia-like substance. I’ve written before how this was a treatment for asthma, which Smart did have and that his suddenly stopping to pray may have been a response to the feelings of doom an incoming asthma attack can cause. However, I don’t think these negate possible symptoms of bipolar, only that they are a different problem that run alongside it.


Smart engaged in many behaviours that constitute a manic state. Gray mock’s Smart’s giddiness when producing the student play, The Grateful Fair, or, A Trip to Cambridge, and the young fellow later needed a subscription to bail him out of financial problems after excessive spending. This habit of excessive spending followed him his whole life, with him as debtor, giving away the last of the money which had been given to him charitably. 


He exhibits burst of manic energy at new projects, like The Midwife which floundered after the burst of a new project, The Old Woman’s Oratory. He signed a 99 year contract for the Universal Visiter. Samuel Johnson said, "I wrote for some months in 'The Universal Visitor for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in 'The Universal Visitor' no longer.”

A person in a manic episode often sleeps little, talks lots and engages in risky behaviours. It was around the time of The Old Woman’s Oratory that rumours started to circulate that Smart was going into Molly Houses and there were snide insinuations that he should be referred to as ‘Kitty’ rather than ‘Kit’. His companion on this journeys was supported to be Samuel Foote, who was later accused of forcibly buggering a man, something he denied because he literally only had one leg to stand on. Yet, Foote’s modern biography does point out that his accuser did have some very specific details, and Foote’s own behaviours had been growing more reckless after the near death experience that lost him his foot.


Examples of the depressive phase are harder to find, which makes sense as they tend to be quieter. There are times throughout his writing career where the words just stop, or where he is reported being out of action due to some illness. These illnesses may have been asthmatic flare-ups, the colds and fevers that regularly put city dwellers out of commission or the ghostly apparition of a depressive period.


Certainly, the poem he wrote at the conclusion of one of these illnesses, Hymn to the Supreme Being does include a very recognisable and gripping account of depression - even as his father-in-law tried to use it to sell fever powders. In the poem, Smart talks about sending his thoughts back through his life to find at least element of goodness. He compares it to Noah, sending birds to look for dry land but says that, for him, there’s no dove with an olive branch, his life is wholly and completely wicked and useless. If this is not a vivid description of depression, I don’t know what is.


I think it would be very interesting to read/analyse Jubilate Agno with the idea of bipolar disorder in mind, to see if highs and lows in his emotional state can be traced in it. As far as we know, he wrote a couple of lines of it a day, so it could provide the closest to a daily ‘check in’ we have. That said, it’s not the perfect document to show his mental state, it’s not a diary but a poem, with aesthetic and literary rules and limitations - but it could be worth a whack.


I need Samuel Johnson to conclude this post, he had a knack for balancing different views in one sentence. On one hand, I feel that ‘knowing’ whether Smart had a mental illness like bipolar disorder would make him more understandable but on the other, it makes no difference at all. That he suffered in life is true, but that he experienced a lot of joy is also. All that’s left of him are a few anecdotes and a body of work, a body of work that gives me a lot of joy. I come, as I often do, back to the his line in On a Bed of Guernsey Lillies, “we never are deserted… quite.”




Wednesday 16 October 2024

Review: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

 Somehow the phrase ‘how Proust can change your life’ was in my head.Turns out it’s the title of an Alain de Botton book. My Alain de Botton phase was short lived and a long time ago and the French author he introduced to me was Michel de Montaigne. I’ve now read all of In Search of Lost Time (though it was the Scott Moncrieff translation, In Remembrance of Things Past) and I have to admit myself unchanged. 

Towards the end of the last volume, Proust says that he “should not ask them (the reader) to praise or to censure me, but simply tell me whether it is really like that.” He then says that his book is a tool, a lens for the reader to look inwards and if it doesn’t work it’s because “the reader has eyes for which my book is not a suitable instrument.” I guess mine are the wrong eyes because ‘it’ whether that be external or internal life doesn’t seem the same to Proust as it does to me.


That’s not to say we never converged. The immediate opening of Swann’s Way has Proust describing a sensation I have often felt but never properly shaped, that feeling of a room becoming all the rooms you have slept in as you wake up. Proust is great, in general, at describing all the woozy feelings; sleepiness, being half-asleep, falling asleep, being drunk. A great deal of the book is about the vividness of internal experience with the mediated flatness of communal and he’s really good at these moments when one slips into another.


Yet I was never as needy as the narrator. If my parents were laughing with friends downstairs when I was supposed to be falling asleep, my emotional response wasn’t a crippling panic attack at my mum not kissing me goodnight, but outrage that my parents could have fun when I wasn’t around. The narrator’s peculiar clinginess stretches into his young adult life, where going to sleep in a hotel room is some huge ordeal that can only be healed by his grandmother’s knocking on the wall to remind him that she’s there. Then it goes into his romantic life, an area where Proust certainly didn’t describe ‘it’, and I felt like I was reading something strange, alien and psychotic.


He makes the astute observation that we fall more in love with our own imagined picture of a person than the reality of them. He describes wonderfully that time as a young man when you fall in love with every woman you pass on the street, something I remember (though he calls them ‘young girls’ and gives hints that they really are young girls, not women). However the stalkerish elements of his love are not anything I’ve ever experienced. His love is one that feels nothing about following someone, breaking into their things and using people to arrange meetings.


What’s more, once he does obtain one of the objects of his affection, Albertine, he goes off her and feels that she’s little more than a pet cat. Then the only thing that incenses his ‘love’ is the jealousy that she might be sleeping with other women. This belief in the importance of jealousy must be an important one for Proust, because it was the key for Swann’s love of Odette. What is even more strange, sickening and peculiar is the way the narrator envisions Albertine as the great love of his life, it’s the core of the story and a subject repeatedly pawed over and regurgitated. At the end, when he meets Gilbertine’s daughter, who merges the Swann and Guermantes ways, it’s supposed to be an apotheosis to the story - but my only reaction was to beg him not to lock this one up.


A lot of the book deals with the narrator’s social climbing and (I suppose) acerbic takes on high society. He’s shocked that the rarefied world of the Guermantes is not the magic lantern he imagined as a child, but some pretty stupid people wasting time in pretty stupid ways. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in an era where the doings of the rich and powerful is splashed everywhere, but it seems pretty obvious that’s what high society is - and I question why someone who is so dismissive of that world remains so attached to it. Presumably because he’s even more dismissive of the middle-class culture vultures like the Verdurins, and completely disdains the inner lives of working people like Francoise. I also wonder why high society bothers with him, he doesn’t seem to be offering anything.


Yes, the narrator has a great openness to beauty, especially architectural and natural beauty. The description of the trees and cliffs around Balbec, or the steeple at Combray are spot on depictions of those ordinary things that catch the breath sometimes. Proust is also great at writing how the writing, painting and music we hear then shape our experience of the world. It feels very real that a church in Balbec that was talked up by Swann, proved a disappointment until rephrased by Elstir. 


There are many moments and locations in the book that shine off the page. Whether that’s the village of Combray, the shining underwater hotel at Balbec, the slow-motion of the ‘little gang’ walking along the beach - and there are many more. There are also some very engaging characters. I loved his grandmother in her contrariness and love, the way her death was dealt with and the way his mother slowly became her. I like Francoise, even through his condescension. I liked Aunt Leonie, she made me laugh. I also didn’t mind St Loup, as far as posh boys go. I thought the narrator treated him terribly - does the narrator even have any actual friends? He shits on St Loup, Bloch, the little gang, the Guermantes, the Verdurins… does he actually have any affection, warmth or kindness? He’s a conceited, insufferable little shit - and he’s the author’s proxy.


Towards the end of the last volume, Proust has a 70 page explanation of what the book was trying to do, prefaced by a comment that only bad books have mission statements. In light of that, I would have to say that Proust very admirably succeeded in the things he set out to achieve, that he took on a huge project and did it well. I also have to say that I disagree with a number of those fundamentals.


That a book should focus on the physical tangible details, I agree with. I also agree that these moments can be universal and beyond time and it’s a great thing to have a book celebrating them and encouraging its readers to find them. His definition of the artistic sense as a faculty of submitting to the reality within themselves is also both interesting and important. Every painting, novel, work of art is an expression of the internal reality of it’s creator and, hopefully, universal enough to catch a reader. (I would argue that a novel is as much a craft as it is an art and that it needs to stand on it’s own legs as a chair does.. but that’s a different discussion).


I enjoyed his note that, “the working class are as bored by novels of popular life as children are by the books that are written specially for them.” It’s very much like Johnson’s comments about children’s fiction. However, I do think Proust mainly uses this as an excuse to have been writing about all the useless posh people he has. Especially because he then says that the engine that drives all self knowledge and artistic discovery is suffering. What suffering has the narrator really had? The play wasn’t as good as he hoped, the dinner party was boring and the woman he arbitrarily chose didn’t like being a prisoner. If suffering gives birth to art, then surely the working classes, who suffer far more, are the best subjects of it.


What’s more this notion that suffering is the key and that “the happy years are the lost, the wasted years” seems puerile tosh. Many great artists have suffered, it’s a precarious life. Viewed in the right way, most lives could be painted as lives as suffering, art and genius don’t really come into it. I’m not convinced that it was Van Gogh’s suffering that made him a great painter and the notion of tortured genius feels like a fallacy. 


While I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’d like to recapture the lost time I spent reading Proust’s masterwork, there were many moments, characters and descriptions I very much enjoyed, I wouldn’t say I’d rush to repeat the experience. I certainly wouldn’t say it changed my life. 




Wednesday 9 October 2024

On Idleness

 On the day I write this (a couple of days before I post) I find myself reflecting on yesterday. Yesterday was a Saturday, I was not at work, I had no rehearsals (for I’m in a play) and I had no plans or particular desires. It was a lazy day and I spent it doing things that had no real purpose yet it was a day that was very satisfying and very productive.

I did some chores, doing my laundry and hoovering the house. I made a weird little playlist, inspired by some weird little playlists I made years before. I painted a silly and slightly wonky mural in the back garden of a punk seagull singing karaoke into a pink swirly lollypop. I also finally finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.


I need to let the book digest a little before I can talk about it much, but in that final volume the narrator, Marcel, realises that the wasted years of his life haven’t been wasted but were actually the accumulation of all the experiences that he needed to start on his life’s work. I can’t say I fully vibed with Proust (and will explain all that in another post) but he does share this sense of laziness and missed opportunities with two authors I do love, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne. 


Samuel Johnson saw himself as a great slave to idleness, frequently berating himself for his laziness and beseeching God to forgive him for the times he has been idle and praying for strength and resilience to resist its bewitching allure. He saw laziness as a swamp that would suck him into greater vices - particularly those of masturbation and sexual fantasy. He found nothing productive in laziness, as Proust did and instead saw it as an insidious sucker of resolve and confidence, always undermining the best efforts of mankind in general and himself in particular.


Yet, despite this private disgust at his own laziness, Johnson called one of his projects The Idler and speaks of it in less fearful terms. He jokes about how easy it is to feel good about achieving some small successes as so many people are too lazy to do anything and says that those same people label anything that is merely impossible. As much as he hated it in himself, he did admit that laziness is one of the less vicious sins, as a truly lazy person is too lazy to do anything really heinous.


Montaigne also talks a lot about laziness. It’s clear that as a child, he was frequently castigated for his idle temper and says how the risk was not that he would do something bad, only that he would do nothing at all. The worry of his family was not that he would be an evil person, only a useless one.


Even as an older man he admits his soul is so lazy that he doesn’t measure his “fortune by its height but by its pleasantness.” However, Montaigne, being the self-accepting person that he is, has no problem with these priorities. By the end of his essays, having struggled through the forbidding notion that philosophy is about learning to die well, then as a way to live well, understands that it’s good enough to have lived at all.


I come back to one of my favourite quotes, from the last essay;

“What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done much today.’ - ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’"


How much happier Samuel Johnson would have been had he came to this conclusion. Even Proust has to justify his lazy, wasted years as grist for his mill and fodder for his book. We should all take those words of Montaigne to heart, accept that our lazy days are still days we have lived and that’s all that’s required of us in this life. And sometimes .. sometimes those lazy days are the ones where we produce the things that really last.


Like this terrible painting that could live on this wall for decades to come.







Wednesday 2 October 2024

Review: Journey Back to Freedom by Catherine Johnson



I’ve had Olaudah Equiano’s An Interesting Narrative for a long time and it’s probably the book that has most often been at the top of my reading pile that has fallen back down it. This is because I’m ‘not in the mood for it’ or that it seems ‘heavy’. I’m not sure I want to face something as depressing and soul-crushingly sad as the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s some buried racism in me. 

I’m working in a number of classes in my new school, classes that have a corridor with all the levelled reading books in it. These books are not only scheme books but some proper books as well and I saw that one was about Olaudah Equiano, called Journey Back to Freedom. I also saw it was by Catherine Johnson and that name tugged my memory somewhere.

Sadly, that memory was The Curious Case of the Lady Caraboo, a book I’d found cheap and exploitative, making up faux rape backstories for a character who was far more peculiar and interesting to have that fictional slop put on her. At least Olaudah Equiano was African so Johnson couldn’t artificially blacken him up in ways that act counter to the main narrative.

Alas, because I haven’t yet read his Interesting Narrative (and because it’s deep in some box, some-where) I can’t really assess this book for egregious changes in history to serve her story. From the notes at the back it seems that Johnson didn’t fully get on with Equiano. There’s the big stuff, that he worked on slave ships and as an overseer even as a free man. She also describes him as sounding smug. He wheeled and dealed his way out of chattel slavery, I think he has something to be smug about. 

However much as I was willing to rag on Johnson, Journey Back to Freedom is a decently told story to children that puts across what slavery and the slave trade actually were and the horrors of that while still connecting it with things they understand and can somewhat relate to.

It also emphasises how slavery was experienced differently in different places. Being indulged in England, working hard but as a team with free people on the ships, and the worst kind in the plantations of Jamaica. There’s a really good point that the slave owners of Jamaica went beyond the evil of owning people for the sake of free labour but actually developed a desire to hurt the slaves for no reason - even if it was counterintuitive to their productivity. I doubt there are any stories for primary-aged children that include the word ‘sadism’ but this came close.

There are exciting moments told in simple language, when a stupid captain ignores Equiano and the rest of his crew and steers his ship into rocks, or the battle at sea where a musket ball passed through his officer’s cheek. There’s also a good representation of the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the ship.

Despite my animus against Catherine Johnson, I think this is a very good and readable account and a good introduction to Oluadah Equiano, which adds a little more nuance and detail about the slave trade. 

There is another children’s book about Equiano by Dr Robert Hume called Oluadah Equiano, The Slave with the Loud Voice but I should probably stop reading children’s versions of his story and get on with reading the real thing.