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.

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. 

Review: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

I've previously talked on this blog about the writings of William Harrison Ainsworth and some writings about him. He features prominently in Zadie Smith's newest novel, The Fraud. 

 I love Zadie Smith in concept, she often sets her books in places I know intimately. The school I used to work at was mentioned in her novel NW, and I met her and she was lovely. But I’ve never got on with her work, I reckon it’s because one of her biggest influences is Henry James and I’ve never got on with him either. Yet The Fraud is almost designed to appeal to me, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Fraud is partially about the Tichbourne claimant, a man who said he was the lost heir to a large inheritance, despite being obviously (and I mean ludicrously obviously) not. This was a story that took the Victorian era by storm and it’s one of those little stories I’ve long been interested in, I love a bold con-artist and have read and written about Psalmanazar, Princess Caraboo and Martin Guerre. The claimant, Arthur Orton, was buried in St Pancras Cemetery, one of my lockdown haunts.

The story of the Tichbourne claimant is told through its impact on the Ainsworth family. This consists of fading writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, his two grown daughters, his new wife (previously his maid) their daughter and housekeeper Mrs Touchet, who is the point-of-view character. I’m a big fan of William Harrison Ainsworth and have enjoyed all of his books I have read. I also find him an interesting person and loved Shark Alley, a novel written by his modern biographer, Stephen Carver. (Who is mentioned in the acknowledgements).

Through the experience of Mr Bogle, a key witness in the Tichbourne case, the reader is taken to Jamaica in the era of slavery, a section of the book that is striking in its offhand brutality. People are mutilated, boiled alive and subject to a terrifying disease called yaws but these horrors are everyday events and more powerful for the lack of drama attributed to them. It’s also interesting how confused Bogle is when the English complain about being ‘made slaves’ when arguing over the finer details of representation.

While the title of The Fraud seems to put the Tichbourne claimant story at the centre of the book, it’s easily the weakest element. Mrs Touchet, our viewpoint character, is dragged along to the trial by William Harrison Ainsworth’s second wife but becomes deeply engaged and invested in the witness, Andrew Bogle. The absolute strangeness of the case is touched upon, the fact that Arthur Orton is nothing like the missing claimant in body or education. That he speaks no French, when the person he’s claiming to be grew up with it as a first language, that he’s missing a tattoo, that he’s of a completely different build. The book also goes into the delusional nature of his supporters, people like Ainsworth’s second wife Sarah, believe in Orton as a bizarre statement of class consciousness. She’d probably be an anti-vaxxer these days.

If anyone in the book is designated the fraud (though most of the characters are conning themselves or others about something) it’s probably William Harrison Ainsworth. He’s depicted as a man who had initial success as an author because he was so liked and likeable, with a gift for joy, but not one for writing. Touchet often talks about how she pretends to read his books, groans at the historical details in them and finds his books terribly dull. She says that he’s easy to like, his books are not. I happen to disagree. I find him to be an author who is very good at creating vivid images and set-pieces, but not so good at dialogue. He’d have been a killer silent film director. There is a sense that he and Arthur Orton have both managed to fail up, where any failure would be disastrous for Bogle or Touchet.

Mrs Touchet is a really interesting figure. Seemingly puritanical and frosty, she is also the lesbian lover of Ainsworth’s first wife, Frances and a BDSM mistress to Ainsworth himself. She’s tetchy, irritable and I loved her line about living in the countryside, “the lamb didst bore her.” She’s an abolitionist because she’s drawn into it to impress Frances but is then horrified at the real stories she hears from Bogle. In some ways she is the real fraud of the book, as the real Mrs Touchet died before most of the events in the book even happened. The character is integral to the novel but in reality was not even there.

The most mysterious character, fraud-wise, is Andrew Bogle. The courtroom and the book initially place him in the position of loyal servant, but how much of what he does is driven by survival or even hatred? He seems the most clear and transparent of the characters even as he is the least.

The three elements of this book don’t dovetail into each other but rather reflect and rub each other in strange ways. The William Harrison Ainsworth frame story seems to be particularly disconnected from the Tichbourne case and Bogle’s narrative and really only makes sense as a narrative choice in allusive or eliding ways, only really seeming to fit when thought about. In some moods this strikes me as more satisfying than if there had been clear links, and in other moods it strikes me as less. It does mean I’m happy to give some of Zadie Smith’s other novels a second go. 

A tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI

For some reason I’ve been getting lots of adverts of for AI tools, especially ones for writers. The ones on Facebook are ver funny, they have hundreds of comments but are all hidden because each one is pointing out that using AI to write something for you is not writing. Youtube has taken its own turn, deciding to advertise programmes that can write, package and release your book in under an hour. I thought I’d have a little play. 

I picked www.tinywow.com because it was free. 

First I asked it to write a short story of three paragraphs and used as a prompt ‘Samuel Johnson’s relationship with his little brother’, as that’s the theme of the novel I’m currently writing. 

Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a story, it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, the AI made up Samuel’s previously unknown younger brother, Thomas. I did actually try and name Sam’s brother in my prompt but there was a character limit to the prompt and Nathaniel didn’t fit.

Unlike Nathaniel, Sam was really nice to Thomas, becoming his mentor and becoming a ‘testament to the power of sibling love and the joy of intellectual companionship’. It’s almost the exact opposite relationship to the one I’m writing about.

Next I asked it to write a 15,000 word essay about what Samuel Johnson would have thought about AI. Aside from the essay being a but cluttered for the short word count (with a new subheading every hundred words) the piece reads pretty well at first glance.

 It introduces Samuel Johnson as ‘an 18th-century English writer, poet, and moralist, was known for his keen intellect and wit. He is best known for his compilation of the first comprehensive English dictionary. Johnson's work often reflected his views on morality, society, and human nature.’ Interesting that some of the phrases used to describe him are exactly the same ones from the ‘story’, that must be all this particular algorithm knows of Samuel Johnson. The piece then often talks about Samuel’s beliefs in ‘honesty, integrity and compassion’ and says that his ‘philosophy centered around the idea that individuals have a moral duty to uphold principles of decency and kindness in their lives.’

The AI uses these generalities throughout to make it sound like the ‘essay’ is about something without it having to have any real content. I think it could be argued that Johnson did have a very strong belief in the moral duty to uphold principles of dignity (kindness perhaps being a little less certain). However, most writers and thinkers could be described as having those same beliefs. This is especially true of Samuel Johnson, who was a masterful repackager of standard moral teachings but not a hugely original thinker in himself. 

A more sophisticated AI might have used some more particularly Johnsonian phrases and ideas. His notion of ‘the vacuity of life’, that life is essentially an empty hole we fill with the things that are important to us, could have had some really interesting interplay with the notion of AI. Would Johnson have viewed AI as a way of filling this hole, or as something pernicious, taking away the important things that occupy us?

The ‘truest’ paragraph of the piece was the one about Johnson’s perspective on scientific progress; ‘Johnson viewed scientific progress with a mix of curiosity and caution. While he appreciated the pursuit of knowledge, he also warned against the dangers of unchecked technological advancement that could lead to moral dilemmas and societal disruptions.’ This is very true. Johnson loved science and had his own shed where he did dangerous chemical experiments. Yet, social stability was his big shibboleth, even as he tweaked the nose of the gentry, he believed in the arbitrary hierarchy because to shake it was to threaten that stability. 

Oddly, the piece becomes more casual as it goes on, with many exhortations to imagine Samuel Johnson doing various things.  ‘Picture Samuel Johnson scratching his head…Imagine Johnson scrolling through his Twitter feed…let's envision Johnson perched on a virtual soapbox…If Johnson sat down for tea with Siri, what discussions would unfold?’ I think these are probably pre-programmed methods to make an essay more engaging, yet I can’t help but wonder if they also have something to do with his imagine being used in a popular meme. (I remember once, volunteering at Doctor Johnson’s House and some students came in out of curiosity and were very excited that it was the house of ‘that meme guy’.)

The back of the ‘essay’ is also filled with rhetorical questions. Presumably, this is a way to pad the word count without having to make any conclusions or say anything definitive. It ends by bidding adieu to our imaginary tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI - becoming oddly Frenchified . Aside from anything, it shows that the AI has clearly not yet gobbled up the works of Johnson or even the Samuel Johnson Quote Page. No writer about Samuel Johnson could write a whole piece about him without one quote. 

Of course, it is impossible to know what Samuel Johnson would have made of AI, it’s quite a silly question (and so perfect for this blog). As someone who said that, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors”, I imagine that a machine that steals from them to create contentless waffle would not appeal to him. 

The picture at the top was an image generated on the same site of 'Samuel Johnson playing ping-pong'.

Review: Sterne's Memoirs

 “Laurence Sterne springs a new surprise, read the envelope that had landed on my doormat. 

It’s not exactly a new surprise, the book came out in 1985. A leaflet in the back includes a Shandy Hall appeal, designed to help Kenneth and Julia Monkman, who were live-in, unpaid curators. The leaflet points out how Kenneth is now isn his mid-seventies and look for money to establish a paid curator, ‘not quite yet perhaps, but eventually’. Kenneth seemed to be something of an obsessive, he was eventually buried at the foot of Sterne’s grave, I hope Sterne gave him a warm welcome. His wife, Julia, planned out a famously beautiful garden which is the home to a huge amount of moths, she took over from Kenneth and then when she died, was replaced by Patrick Wildgust, who is still the curator.

Sterne’s Memoirs was the first book ‘to come out of Shandy Hall since A Sentimental Journey’. Many books have come out (or been republished) through Shandy Hall since. I’ve been a punter for a few of them, including being part of the crowdfunding for the re-publication of ‘Caine’s Jawbone’, which has since become a tik-tok viral hit. They only printed 500 copies and it’s beautifully done. A delicately marbled cover, thick paper with an introduction and commentary and then the work itself, reproduced in Sterne’s own handwriting, with his crossings out and crammings in - he was more a crammer inner than a crosser outer. 

The downside of this gorgeous presentation is the effort it takes to read his writing. There is a printed insert with the version of his memoirs presented by his daughter in her edition of his letters. The surprise mentioned on the envelope are the little differences between the edited, printed version and the manuscript. Key among them, the date of composition. Sterne started writing these before he was a celebrity and not as he was dying. 

To be honest, a lot of the differences, whether he mentioned a Herbert or Hobert, did not mean much to me, being a fond reader of Sterne but not all that knowledgeable about him and his life. I can see how someone who is as indebted in the weeds of Sterne’s life as I am in Johnson’s or Kit Smart’s, the details would be invaluable and very exciting.

As such, a few memories of Sterne were interesting in themselves to me. I was aware his father had been in the army but not quite how enmeshed into army life the Sterne’s had been in. Not only had his father been involved in battles all over the globe, but Laurence found himself all around the British isles. from Dublin to the Isle of Wight. His father’s biggest injury came, not from battle, but a duel fought. He was later shipped off to Jamaica, where he died of fever. Laurence lovingly describes his father as someone “so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no-one, so that you might have cheated him for ten times in a day if nine had not been insufficient.” - A similar sentence later used to describe Uncle Toby.

While it’s clear from Tristram Shandy that Sterne favoured his father than his mother, we find out a little more about her. Laurence’s father was her second husband, her first has also been in the army. She had many children, most of them were sickly and few survived. We learnt about the deaths of little Joram, Mary, Anne and Devischer. We also learn that Laurence became a bit of a celebrity in Ireland as a child when he fell through a mill-race, while the mill was turning. 

No mention is made of the fake memoirs of Sterne created by Richard Griffiths under the name of Tri-juncta-in-uno. Griffiths claimed to have seen some notes Sterne made about his life, maybe he saw these? Well… I’ve seen them now, and in a lovely edition. I’ll gladly read them again and probably a number of times. 

The Journey to 'Death of a Dream-Pedlar'

Death of a Dream-Pedlar had a long and tortuous journey to the place it is now - a brilliant book available to buy in ebook, paperback and hardback form.

Review: The Recruiting Officer at The Stamford Shakespeare Company

 The Stamford Shakespeare Company are an institution in the local area. Founded in the sixties, various machinations have meant they are in the very enviable position of having a permanent theatre, quite a coup for an amateur company. More than this, it’s an outdoor venue (pre-dating Regent’s Park’s outdoor theatre) in an area of pretty gardens and an oldish building, Tolethorpe Hall, as the backdrop. 

Judging by the costuming and set design, they may also be one of the most solvent amateur theatre groups in the country - last year I saw The Woman in the Van, a production that included three vans. In my time reviewing productions over the last year and a half, I reckon the Stamford Shakespeare Company are richer than most professional companies. 

It creates a strange, quite magical and very English phenomenon. On a performance level it involves amateur acting (though often very good amateur acting), supported by more-than professional budget in an event that is a centrepiece for the local area. 

What happens is, the great and the good (and the wannabe or thinktheyare great and good) from Rutland, Cambridgeshire, the posh bits of Lincolnshire, like the Deepings and such, all congregate on this manor house and gardens. There they park their cars (ours was parked near small gravestones for ‘Gypsy’ and a number of other cats) and carry picnics through to the grounds. My mum is a powerful picnic maker, but even her efforts are dwarfed by people who bring chairs, tables, tablecloths, flowers in vases, candles in candle holders, silver cutlery…it’s a heaven for Hyacinth Buckets. 

After this elaborate feast, the picnics are packed up and the people are called to the auditorium, inside for the audience, outside for the performers. The stage is ringed by bushes and trees and there is usually an elaborate set, sometimes with multiple levels. We went to see George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. There were shops on one side with a shambles and fruit stall that was also accessible on a higher level. Behind was a simpler ‘house’ set and a full standing market hall. Coming up are a full cast in period dress, a little clumsy swordfighting, a bunch of jokes - some of them working, some of them not, and a folk band.

I’ve been to see the Stamford Shakespeare Company a number of times - although, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the Shakespeare, that’s usually earlier in the summer than when I visit. There have been some very good plays, the newer ones I’ve found the best, particularly The Lady in the Van. However, the play is definitely just one part of the wider experience. This would likely be my last chance to visit though and I was pleased it was coinciding with an 18th century piece.

I thought The Recruiting Officer quite a bold choice for a company most comfortable in Shakespeare, Wilde and Noel Coward. Eighteenth Century stuff simply doesn’t have the cultural ubiquity to make it easy to approach as a performer or an audience, lacking the prestige of earlier theatre and relatability of newer. This is especially true of Farquhar’s work, coming at the beginning of the century and essentially being the last gasp of restoration ‘humours’ comedy.

In the backdrop of the recent successes of the War of Spanish Succession, a group of grenadiers come to recruit for their regiment in the mostly sleepy town of Shrewsbury. The main recruiter is Sergeant Kite, a man perfectly suited for recruiting work because of his full list of vices. He’s perfectly happy to flim-flam, trick or bully a person into the service for the commission he will get. At one point he even poses as a fortune teller, in order to get the people of the town to accept the army as their fate.

His commander is Captain Plume, well loved of the town and its magistrate, he’s also beloved of his daughter until her older brother dies and she is now worth much more. Will she (or more importantly, her father) settle for a simple captain now. In a similar position is Squire Worthy, his beloved, Melinda, has also come into some money and is using that to punish him for his presumptions towards her during their early courtship. To add to his problems, he has a rival suitor in Captain Brazen, an extravagant fop.

One of the historical elements that I was most excited about was that The George, the hotel I stayed at during my earlier successful trip to Lichfield and my recent unsuccessful one, claimed to be the place Farquhar stayed when he was himself a recruiting officer and the inn and town were inspiration for a number of plays including The Recruiting Officer. How distressing then, that the play says it takes place in Shrewsbury. However, there is a reference to watching the clocks of the churches of St Mary’s and St Chads - both Lichfield churches. Indeed, Samuel Johnson was to be baptised there a couple of years after the play was performed.One of Davey Garrick’s first productions was an amateur production of The Recruiting Officer, in which he gave himself a plum role.

Talking of plum roles, Colley Cibber had a huge hit with his take on Captain Brazen, the outré fop, but fops were his speciality. I really need to write a bit more about him and his fascinating family at some point.

As for the 2024 performance at Tolethorpe, how was it?

One problem with an old comedy is not spotting the jokes that are right there, the other is creating jokes out of nothing. This production was guilty of both these sins. There was a particularly modern elision of the camp inherent in the fop character and homosexuality. Not that there wasn’t a little of that then, but it was an era where men did sometimes wear makeup and often had high heel shoes and ribbons and such. It was fashionable to speak in a fop-talk and lard as many foreign phrases as possible. Really the fop should be understood as closer to hipster or something of that ilk - and to have him cop a feel of Captain Plume whenever possible doesn’t really understand what a fop was. 

What’s more, there were an awful lot of “gay..hehehe” jokes for a modern production. I suppose the audience at Tolethorpe skews old and such Are You Being Served jokes still land well - but a younger or more metropolitan audience would have been perplexed at the attempts to create laughs out of gay panic. Jokes that weren’t really in the text. There were the misunderstandings of ‘the fop’ as a character, but there was also a lot of misunderstanding of how common it was for people to bunk up together. That the soldiers shared beds wasn’t a terrible indication of gayness in the military, simply a reflection on poor pay and limited bed space.

It was also one of the more indifferently directed plays I’ve seen there. A lot of clumped blocking, not very good use of a large stage, with people in tight areas throughout. The sword fight and the pistol duel weren’t really maximised for comedy or suspense. There was a scene with a man hiding under a table during a crystal ball reading that felt like it had a lot of potential on the stage (such as the table leaping about the stage as the crystal ball reader says its possessed) that didn’t fully cohere in the cramped tent set they were using. 

There was a very good scene involving lots of innuendo about breasts of chickens and the breasts of the chicken seller, and the comic pairing of Costar and Tom was very good. I also enjoyed the performance of Brazen, who had the theatricality of the fop down pat, especially the way Brazen fumbles for a heightened elegance he never quite reaches. 

I had a lot of pleasure going to see The Recruiting Officer and I’m sorry I probably won’t get to be going to see the Stamford Shakespeare Company for a while. If you want to experience something very unique, next year they are playing it safe with two Shakespeares and an Oscar Wilde.