Thirsk for Knowledge

A Yorkshire Vet Through the Seasons, Julian Norton (Michael O’Mara 2017)

One of my big reader’s regrets is that I never read any of the James Herriot books until I was an adult. I enjoyed them a lot and have re-read them several times, but I’d’ve enjoyed them even more as a kid. Herriot was a skilful writer able to evoke all the sights, sounds and smells of his life as a rural vet in 1930s Yorkshire. And then 1940s and ’50s Yorkshire and beyond. His writing had humor and depth and was full of memorable characters, human and animal.

Julian Norton was inspired to become a vet by those books and the television series based on them. And after he followed in Herriot’s veterinary footsteps, he became famous like Herriot too. Except that his fame came the other way around: first a TV series, then a string of best-selling books based on the series. I’ve never seen the TV series, but I’ve started to read and enjoy the books. Julian Norton has a lot of James Herriot’s gift for narrative, anecdote and humor. He’s as likeable on the page as he must be on the screen. But you don’t get animal encounters like this in the Herriot books:

Fields that once were home to over a hundred black and white cows were filled with elegant, long-legged and long-necked creatures whose eyelashes rivalled those of their bovine predecessors and whose fleeces were many times softer than those of the sheep whose fields they adjoined. […] On my first visit I found that, quite unlike sheep, which would immediately tend towards fear and flight, these curious creatures would come up and investigate whatever was going on. They had no malice and radiated a calm serenity, both in their demeanour and also the gentle noises they made. Standing in a field of alpacas, I discovered, was a calming, tranquil experience. – “Miscellaneous Creatures”, pp. 187-8

That’s from the “Summer” section of A Yorkshire Vet through the Seasons, which begins in “Winter” and ends in “Autumn”. The variety of weather he encounters, from snow and sleet to sun and mist, is surpassed only by the variety of animals. There are a lot of them here, from the everyday to the exotic. There’s a lot of science too. Fortunately, Norton wears his learning lightly, which is just as well, because he has a lot of it: it’s harder to become a vet nowadays than a doctor. Competition for places at veterinary school is more intense and academic demands are higher, thanks first to James Herriot and then to the vets who followed his lead and wrote about their lives as a vet or allowed cameras to film them at work. But being a vet has always been harder, both physically and intellectually, than being a doctor. On the one hand, farming vets are routinely injured and sometimes killed by their sick patients, and have to attend them in all kinds of weather and places. On the other, there’s a much greater variety of anatomy and ailment to learn. Particularly nowadays. And a sick animal can’t say where or how it hurts, of course.

So there’s often a puzzle to be solved at the beginning of a vet’s meeting with a new patient. What’s wrong with this animal and how do I treat the problem? James Herriot asked that question every day and now Julian Norton is asking it too. He has more help from science and technology, but he sometimes fails just as James Herriot did. Herriot’s boss Siegfried Farnon told him all those years before: no other profession gives you more chance to look like a fool. Or like a hero. Sometimes James Herriot did both several times in a single morning, as he drove from farm to farm in pre-war Yorkshire. Nearly a century later, Julian Norton is doing the same. And not just in the same county: in the same district of the same county. Norton is based in the Yorkshire town of Darrowby just as Herriot was and works for Herriot’s old practice.

Except that the town is really called Thirsk, not Darrowby. And Herriot’s boss was really called Donald Sinclair, not Siegfried Farnon. James Herriot himself was really called Alf Wight. The books he wrote under that pen-name weren’t journalistic but impressionistic: he edited events, combined characters and was sometimes writing short stories rather than strict biography. Julian Norton’s books aren’t like that: he’s often describing things that the TV cameras have already captured, so he sticks to facts and doesn’t resort to fiction. Apart from that, his books are a lot like the Herriot books. And particularly in the way that matters most: they’re fun to read. He doesn’t write quite as well as James Herriot, but you can learn more about animals from him. James Herriot dealt day in, day out, with a strictly limited set of four-footed patients: cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, cats. He rarely treated anything else. Julian Norton routinely treats a much greater variety of animals than that: four-footed animals like alpacas, two-footed animals like swans, no-footed animals like snakes. And a lot more besides. I don’t want to see the TV series that inspired his books, but I’m glad that it did.

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Miserissimy Memoirs

The God Squad, Paddy Doyle (1988)

Paddy Doyle had a Catholic upbringing. A bad one. A very bad one, because he was raised from early childhood by sadistic nuns. His relatives didn’t want him after his mother died of breast-cancer and his grief-stricken father committed suicide, so he was sent to an Irish “industrial school” run by the church. At the age of four he had found his father’s corpse hanging from a tree in the garden, which gave him nightmares for many years. But he didn’t get any sympathy or love from the nuns. Instead he got this:

Mother Paul slammed her cane onto the table in front of her.

“Strip, child,” she shouted.

I began to take off my clothes. First my heavy grey jumper, then the grey shirt.

“Come on, come on, I haven’t all day. Get those trousers, boots and socks off immediately.”

I stood there shivering, a combination of cold and fear. My ribs protruded through my skin as though I was undernourished. My skin was white except for red patches where I had been hit or jabbed by the cane.

“Get on that table,” she demanded.

I lay on it naked, allowing my arms to hang over its side until I was told to bring them onto the table and down either side of my body. She gazed at me, a perverse grin on her face.

“Roll over onto your face and let this be a lesson to you.”

Her long cane whistled through the air and in the moment before it made contact every muscle in my body tensed and I became rigid. I squirmed and the first vicious blow stung, but I did not cry out.

“Never, never must you assault a holy nun in that manner.”

A second, third and fourth painful lash of the bamboo, and I could feel my skin burning. For some reason I cannot understand I refused to cry out. The number of times I was struck increased until it was impossible to count, just as it was difficult to separate one blow from another. I remained silent, until the pain became unbearable and I finally screamed. I was being struck everywhere from the back of my neck down to my heels. – Chapter One

That’s a memory from about 1958, when Doyle was seven. He’d been hungry and called out to one of the trains that were loaded with sugar-beet at a station just outside the walls of St Michael’s Industrial School in Cappoquin. A kindly driver or fireman had thrown him a sugar-beet and he and his friends had broken it into pieces and started eating it raw. Then the sadistic nun Mother Paul had intervened, accusing him of stealing the beet, hitting him with a cane and terrifying him with the school dog, a Jack Russell called Toby. Doyle cracked and fought back, kicking the nun in the shin with his boot. And so he was ordered to strip and was beaten viciously with the cane, as described in the extract above.

That was the pattern of Doyle’s childhood: beatings, beratings, psychological bullying and sadism, threats of burning “for ever and ever” in the fires of Hell, constant hunger, cold, fear and deprivation of sleep, plus an episode of sexual abuse by Mother Paul, who knocked him down a flight of stairs shortly afterwards. When things changed, they only got worse. He developed a bad limp, had to leave the friends he’d made at the industrial school and go into hospital, where he underwent painful operations and brain surgery. And all the time he was haunted by memories of his father’s suicide, which the nuns had tried to repress with beatings and denials.

In short, The God Squad is Misery Lit with a capital M and capital L. The trouble is that it isn’t very good misery lit. I’d like to report that Doyle had turned the suffering of his childhood into powerful prose and moving stories. But I can’t, because he didn’t. He isn’t a very good or evocative writer and his suffering didn’t inspire a classic of autobiography and of insight into cruelty, childhood and the human condition. You can learn about all three things here, but the prose doesn’t make it a very easy or aesthetically enjoyable experience. You’ve seen an example of his literary shortcomings above: “My ribs protruded through my skin as though I was undernourished.” But he’d already established that he was undernourished. He’d been eating raw sugar-beet, for Heaven’s sake, which was why he was about to be beaten so viciously. The sentence should have gone simply: “My ribs protruded through my skin.”

The book has lots more writing that could have been better expressed and stronger to read. Yes, it was a bestseller in both Ireland and Britain, winning Doyle praise and prizes, but I think that voyeurism for victimhood and hostility to the Catholic church must have been a big part of that. So Paddy Doyle’s biggest contribution to literature may have been indirect, because his misery memoir was possibly the biggest inspiration for a true literary classic: Sunny McCreary’s My Godawful Life (2008). It’s a classic of comedy, satirizing the genre of misery lit with a verve and invention that left me incredulous at times. I kept asking: “How does he keep making things more ridiculous and still keep it all funny?” In fact, not just keep it funny: make it funnier. Sunny starts life living in a bird-coop in Ireland, being hit with ever larger and spikier objects by his brutal drunk of a father, and assisting his paralyzed prostitute mother service her clients. At school he’s tortured, beaten and bullied by nuns called Sister Himmler and Sister Torquemada. Then things get worse. And worse again. And worse still. When he becomes addicted to helium he thinks he’s hit rock-bottom, metaphorically speaking (literally speaking, he’s bobbing about under the ceiling, full of helium). He’s wrong. Things get worse yet again.

So I think My Godawful Life is the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s one of the most inventive too. I don’t like using the word “genius” about people in the arts, because it’s an over-used word. But sometimes I feel compelled to use it. The comic genius behind My Godawful Life, a Brit of Irish origin called Michael Kelly, showed more of his invention and literary skill when he wrote a book about wrapping Roy Orbison in clingfilm. Like helium addiction, that’s an example of how he can come up with comic combinations that seem crazy but work perfectly. Yes, you feel: that’s just what the Universe has been working towards for billions of years. Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm. You can read some of the stories that preceded the book – and much more besides – at his website: “Michael Kelly’s Page of Misery”. The stories are both weird and wonderful. Like Clark Ashton Smith, Kelly should be famed and celebrated around the world as a master of the English language. But perhaps, like Clark Ashton Smith again, he’s too good for that.

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Hod is G-d

Playmaker: My Autobiography, Glenn Hoddle with Jacob Steinberg (HarperCollins 2021)

(This is a guest review by Dr Mordecai Stimbers)

I’ve idolized Glenn Hoddle – and been a proud and passionate Yid – ever since the long-ago day on which my late father took me to a FA Cup tie at White Hart Lane as a bar-mitzvah treat. But in the beginning it seemed much more of a treat for him than it did for me. I was a chubby, brace-faced and bookish nebbish with a squint and ripening crop of raw red pimples. I didn’t want to go to London and I didn’t want to see a team that was Dad’s passion, not mine. We had to get up very early to travel from Glasgow and I was almost asleep on my feet by the time we reached the ground. But the raw and pungent smells of the fast-food stalls, the even rawer and more pungent London accents that sounded on all sides, the sense of occasion and impending conflict brought me wide awake and I was ready to savour every second of the game by the time the two sides came out onto the pitch to a thunderous roar of acclaim.

And savour those seconds I did. There was a folkloric or even mythic resonance to the setting, as though I’d stepped through some mystagogic portal into a realm of legend. I was at White Hart Lane, after all, a name that seemed straight out of Tolkien or the Brothers Grimm. Everything was primal, elemental, bright and clean and eye-stunning, as though freshly forged in the furnaces of creation. The gold of the sun, the gleaming white shirts of Spurs, the blazing red shirts of their opponents, the perfect globe of the ball whizzing to and fro on the vivid green of the pitch – it all struck at my senses as though I was witnessing not merely a football match but existence itself for the very first time. Even the raucous, profane chants and cajolements from the crowds seemed to acquire a choral or incantational quality, as though a congregation of denim-clad worshippers were hymning a ceremony performed by demi-gods or ranks of bright-eyed Cockney magicians were conjuring the spectacle into existence by sheer force of will and lung-power.

But no, that last bit wasn’t right. The only magician on show was that tall and commanding figure at the centre of everything on the pitch: Glenn Hoddle. He played a blinder from first whistle to last, scoring two goals of his own and setting up two more for lesser luminaries before converting a late penalty to send the crowd into a final delirium of delight. But even better than the goals, in some ways, were the silky skills he laid out in midfield, as though, at some deeper level than mere and mundane reality, he was using the ball to festoon the pitch with ribbons of rare and precious fabric, glittering, gold-specked, semi-transparent. When I closed my eyes on the journey home, I could see him playing still: the twists, the feints, the back-heels and clever little one-twos, the passes he seemed able to deliver with pin-point accuracy over any distance he chose. As I thought at the game and as his later manager Arsène Wenger so rightly said: he was a magician. And his magic won my heart then and for ever. I’d been to a few games in Glasgow, experienced the cauldron of a couple of Old Firm matches, and even toyed with the idea of becoming a Partick Thistle supporter. But all that faded like dew before the golden blast of the rising sun as a proud white cockerel crowed in a new day. Nothing now could compete with the magic of Glenn Hoddle and the glamour of the mighty Spurs.

My Dad was even more pleased with my conversion to the cause of Tottenham Hotspurs than he was with the result of the match. He was a Yid himself, like his father and grandfather before him, and had never allowed his birth and upbringing in far-off Glasgow to diminish his passion for the club. He didn’t get to many matches, but he followed Spurs avidly in every available medium from print to radio to TV. He’d tried to infect me with the white-and-blue virus too, but I’d resisted, not understanding why it mattered, not wanting to maintain a long-distance loyalty to a city I’d never visited and a team I’d never seen in the flesh. My mother was dubious too, uninterested in any kind of sport herself and never letting him take me to a Spurs game until that fateful bar-mitzvah treat. But now I’d been and seen and was converted. I had become the fourth generation of the Stimbers family to have blue-and-white pumping through his veins.

Dad had his own favourite players but he recognised the quality of Hoddle and, like me, sympathised with him instinctively as an outsider. Hoddle was too skilful for the rough-and-ready English game and never properly appreciated by too many both on the terraces and in the footballing hierarchy. In this book he mentions the accusations that he was a “luxury player” and recalls the derisive, explicitly misogynistic and homophobic nickname that some threw at him: Glenda. It was both unfair and untrue. He had to battle for the space to display his talent. The game was much more physical when he was at the peak of his career and his skills were never allowed to shine as brightly as they surely would have done in today’s game, where thuggery can’t snuff out artistry as it once so regularly and so depressingly did.

No-one knows all that better than Hoddle himself, as you’ll discover in this readable but insubstantial autobiography. It would have been easy for him to become bitter and resentful, but his much-mocked interest in spirituality does genuinely seem to have brought him peace of mind and the ability to forgive. Besides which, he wasn’t and isn’t a might-have-been, because he became one of the greats, recognized and acclaimed around the world as one of the most skilful players ever to electrify a crowd. He never won the league title that he and his fellow Yids have coveted for too many decades to contemplate, but he played a central role in two classic FA Cup victories and an early English triumph in the UEFA Cup, then won the French league with Monaco. As a manager, he did well at Swindon, less well at Chelsea and Spurs, but with a little more luck and a little more backing from his chairmen he might have brought silverware to one or both of those London giants. He might have won the World Cup with England too. You won’t find any great insights into his successes and near-misses here, but he does set the record straight on his departure from the England job. He was stitched up by a reporter, but says that he’s glad it happened now, because it taught him about the power of forgiveness.

I think he’s sincere, but if he isn’t, so what? All great men have their flaws and Hoddle is in my eyes – and the eyes of countless other Yids – the greatest player ever to don the famous white shirt of the mighty Spurs. The quality of this ghosted autobiography doesn’t match the quality of his football, but it will bring back some happy memories for Yids d’un certain âge all around the world. Plus, it has a good index. When I first took the book up I looked in that index under “Watford”, hoping to find Hoddle’s description of one of his best-ever goals: an outrageously swift-and-skilful turn-and-sublimely-lofted-chip that left both defenders and goalkeeper helpless. But there was no mention of the goal. In one way that was disappointing, in another it felt just right. Hoddle had talent to burn and lit up too many matches with too many outrageous pieces of skill to recall all of them here. This is Hod’s world – you and me, we’re just living in it.

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Dr Mordecai Stimbers is the Manny T. Schwitzowitz Professor of Post-Structural Hermeneutics at the University of West Baltimore

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Clive Drive

Unreliable Memoirs (1980) and Always Unreliable: The Memoirs (2001), Clive James

I first came across Clive James on TV and wasn’t impressed. He’s smug, unfunny and trivial, I thought as I watched him making laboured gags about cheap targets like Japanese endurance-shows. So when I later came across books by him in libraries or second-hand bookshops – The Crystal Bucket (1981) and North Face of Soho (2006) are two titles that come to mind – I didn’t even bother picking them up. Lit’s long, life’s short, and all that.

But one day I came across Unreliable Memoirs (1980), the first volume of his autobiography. And I’d had an interesting literary experience by then. Out of idle curiosity, I’d tried Going to Sea in a Sieve (2012), the autobiography of Danny Baker, someone else I disliked from seeing him on TV (and hearing him on the radio). Before reading Going to Sea, I thought Baker was a brash, loudmouthed vulgarian. Oh, and unfunny and trivial too. But Going to Sea turned out to be one of the best-written, most entertaining and most intelligent autobiographies I’ve ever read. It made me re-think some of my preconceptions not just about Baker but about a lot of other things. Okay, it wasn’t ground-breaking literature and it didn’t reveal the secrets of the Universe, but Baker obviously deserved his success and wasn’t what I thought he was. Going Off Alarming (2014) and Going on the Turn (2017), two further volumes of Baker’s autobiography, were also very good.

Well, if I was so wrong about Danny Baker, perhaps I was wrong about Clive James. So I tried Unreliable Memoirs and discovered that there was no “perhaps” about it. I had indeed been wrong about James. He wasn’t smug, unfunny and trivial. Or not all the time, at least. Certainly not in his vivid and often hilarious evocations of his ’50s childhood and ’60s youth in Australia with a widowed mother. The book gets less good as he grows up and by the time he’s at university the writing is less evocative and less memorable. It’s merely good rather than excellent. In Falling Towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990), the two further volumes of autobiography in an omnibus edition I picked up later, he doesn’t match the best of Unreliable Memoirs. The writing is good, not excellent, and the soon-to-be famous people he’s meeting are less interesting than the never-famous-at-all people he met as a child. But he’s still coming up with clever gags at his own expense and with vivid descriptions of the new places he encountered after leaving Australia for London, Cambridge and Europe. Here he is describing his first visit to Venice:

Before the vaporetto was halfway down the Grand Canal I was already concussed. Heat focused by a nacreous sky like the lining of a silver tureen dissolved the water into a storm of sparks, which were projected as wobbling bracelets of pure light on the otherwise maculate façades of crumbling marble and rotting plaster. The whole place was being eaten alive by liquid luminosity. It was a vision of eternity as soluble as a rusk, God’s love made manifest as a wafer in the world’s wet mouth. – ch. 10, “Attack of the Killer Bee”, May Week Was in June

I like that. I don’t rank Clive James with Evelyn Waugh and Clark Ashton Smith as masters of English prose, but he could certainly turn a phrase. And Italy was where he began turning himself into a remarkable autodidact, able to read and appreciate prose and poetry in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. He says that at Cambridge he spent most of his time roaming off the curriculum and felt very lucky to earn the 2:1 that allowed him to take a PhD. I don’t usually admire scholarship in the arts or degrees in subjects like EngLit. They’re not serious and they’re mostly pursued by third-rate minds. But I take art and literature themselves seriously. And I admire and even idolize those who can do them well.

From what he writes about professors at Cambridge, James thought pretty much the same. He certainly knew that criticizing great art is not to be compared with creating great art. He himself tried to do both and was obviously a highly intelligent and talented man. A charismatic man too. And an attention-seeker with an unstoppable drive for self-publicity, which is why he ending up wasting his talents on the triviality of TV and the mass media. As Danny Baker is still doing. And yes, okay, like Danny Baker again, James wasn’t writing ground-breaking literature or revealing the secrets of the Universe in his autobiographies. But I can definitely recommend them, especially Unreliable Memoirs. It’s funny, poignant, self-revealing and self-lacerating. Like Baker, James was a much more complex and interesting man than his clowning on TV made me suppose.

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Hit and Mistletoe

Through It All I’ve Always Laughed, Count Arthur Strong (Faber & Faber 2013)

The pictures are much better on the radio. But the pay and publicity are much worse, so radio comedians want to get on TV. That’s what happened to Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen. And though they lost a lot when they transferred, they were good on TV too. And they made their performers big stars.

Count Arthur Strong got on TV too, but the man behind the character, Steve Delaney, hasn’t become a big star. I don’t know how good he was on TV, but I do know how good he was on radio. Very good. The Count Arthur Radio Show isn’t as imaginative or as weird as Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, but in its quieter way it’s just as funny. Or funnier. But it took me a while to tune in, as it were. The start of the show put me off at first. Count Arthur announces in a jaunty voice: “Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show!” With rhotacismus. So I used to switch off almost straightaway. I thought the show consisted of silly voices and would-be whimsy. Then I listened properly to one episode and was converted. Count Arthur is very funny and very well-performed. The character is a deluded, would-be actor, raconteur, and expert Egyptologist and is obviously based on Hancock’s Half-Hour. But he doesn’t have the realism or melancholy of Hancock. And for me he’s better.

That said, I don’t think he works anywhere near as well on paper as he does on the radio. His misunderstandings and malapropisms are far funnier with the spoken word, whether he’s dragging a long-suffering shop-assistant or barman into a tangle of non sequiturs and misplaced accusations or delivering one of his ridiculous speeches and lectures. He slurs and splutters when he speaks, which adds to the comedy of what he’s saying. He can’t do that in print, though Steve Delaney tries to do the equivalent. This book is presented as though it’s a typed manuscript by Count Arthur, so he forgets to turn off the caps-lock, mangles spellings, misuses or forgets punctuation, and annotates the pages in biro or uses them for his shopping-lists.

And yes, all that is funny. But not as funny as the spoken stuff. And if you’re familiar with the spoken stuff, you’ll recognize a lot of recycled or previewed material. I recognized one early bit in the book from a recording of one of Count Arthur’s stage-shows. It’s one of funniest things I’ve ever heard him deliver, but if I hadn’t heard it first, would I have found it very funny in print? Maybe not. It’s a rare bit of risqué, you might say, because Count Arthur doesn’t usually rely on double-entendre or celebrity gossip. Here it is from the book:

She always looked younger that she was, did Mother. In fact, we’re all like that in my family. My Uncle Earnest looked like a toddler right up into his seventies. We’ve all got elastic skin like Mother had. Oh yes. I’ve never had any of my buttocks siphoned off and squirted into my forehead like some of them, thank you very much! Cliff Richard has it done more than once a fortnight! It’s a wonder he can sit down. His bottom must be red raw some nights. Lulu, she’s another one. Oh dear! It would be dreadful if they got the syringes mixed up and you ended up with Cliff Richards buttocks in your face. I wouldn’t know where to put myself. I mean I liked, ‘Mistletoe and Wine’, but I wouldn’t want his buttocks in my face.

In the stage-show, that made the audience howl with laughter. I think it’s still funny in print, but I don’t think this book captures much of what makes Count Arthur Strong so good and so funny as a radio or stage performer. Where it works, it works by reminding you of what the character sounds and acts like, not in its own right.

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Clubbed to Deaf

The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2009)

Well, I was wrong. This book isn’t funnier than the first part of Peter Hook’s autobiography. Nor is it as funny. In fact, it was a big disappointment. Not that I’m an ideal reader for a book about a legendary nightclub. Drugs, crowds, bright lights and deafening music. Who could ask for more? Me. Or not me. I’d ask for a lot less. I don’t find this kind of thing amusing:

That [PA] set-up lasted until 1988, when we splashed out for a huge system from Wigwam Acoustics […] that made everyone’s nose tingle because of the huge bottom end, and deafened audiences for a whole week. Eventually we had to turn it down from 140db to 130db because doctors were phoning up to complain – too many patients with Haçienda hearing problems. (“1984”, pg. 84)

But I do find this kind of thing amusing:

A fine example [of our incompetence] was Teardrop Explodes [sic] in May 1982. They were massive at the time and Rob [Gretton, New Order’s manager] paid them £3000 to do a ‘secret’ gig (nudge-nudge, wink-wink, but you’re supposed to let the word out so everyone will come).

We kept it so secret only eight people turned up. (“1982”, pg. 45)

This was amusing too:

We continued to make mistakes. For example, the place would be repainted every week, which cost a fortune. But, rather than wash out the paint tray and rollers, the staff would throw them in a pile then go to B&Q and buy new ones. I found that pile after we went bankrupt and it was like fucking Everest, had two Sherpas and a base camp on it. (“1984”, pg. 82)

And it’s also amusing that both the Haçienda and its cat received catalogue-numbers, Fac 51 and Fac 191, from Factory Records, the home of Joy Division and New Order. But there’s not enough amusing stuff here. For me, the best bits may have been the set-lists for two of the many bands who performed at the Haçienda. This was the Cocteau Twins on Thursday 8th December, 1983:

‘When Mama Was Moth’, ‘The Tinderbox’, ‘Glass Candle Grenades’, ‘In Our Angelhood’, ‘From the Flagstones’, ‘My Love Paramour’, ‘Sugar Hiccup’, ‘Hitherto’, ‘Musette and Drums’ (pg. 71)

And this was Einstürzende Neubaten on Thursday 28th January, 1985:

‘Seele Brennt’, ‘Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.’, ‘Meningitis’, ‘Armenia’, ‘Yü-Gung (Fütter Mein Ego)’, ‘Sehnsucht’, ‘Sand’, ‘Negativ Nein’, ‘Letztes Biest (Im Himmel)’, Hör mit Schmerzen’, ‘Tanz Debil’, ‘Die Genaue Zeit’, Abfackeln!’ (pg. 100)

Just from those song-titles you know that those were two bands who, in their very different ways, were doing something very strange and interesting. Or bloody interesting, in the case of Einstürzende Neubaten and their pneumatic drill: “The gig ended when the singer’s throat burst and he started screaming blood all over the mic. Our sound-guy Ozzie got onstage and knocked him out. ‘I’d warned him once,’ he said.” But Hook doesn’t write about the Cocteau Twins or talk much about gigs by anyone except Einstürzende Neubaten and The Jesus and Mary Chain. The Chainies blew through the Haçienda on their “17 Minutes of Feedback Tour” in 1985. Hook says: “I thought, ‘That sounds quite interesting’, so made sure I worked security that night.” (pg. 93)

Alas, the gig was “excruciating”, because “17 Minutes of Feedback” was exactly what the audience got. Having listened to this, Hook removed the human shield that was protecting the Chainies from the people they’d deliberately provoked: “I was so wound up after they’d finished, I pulled the bouncers off and let the punters at them.” They were quickly sent on their way. But that was in the mid-’80s and soon the gigs at “the Haç” got fewer and fewer as the DJs took over. I think bands and their gigs are much more interesting than DJs and their sets. Joy Division and New Order were interesting, for example, but Hook doesn’t write about them much here either. He refers to New Order mostly as the source of the money poured into the bottomless pit of the Haçienda. As Tony Wilson of Factory Records put it: “About three years after opening the Haçienda we realized that everybody in Manchester was getting free drinks – except for the people who actually owned it.” (pg. 108)

But Hook, Wilson & Co. weren’t content with one bottomless pit: they opened another in the form of a bar called Dry. That too fell victim to the gangs who began to poison Manchester’s night-life in the 1990s. The Haçienda tried to fight fire with fire by hiring thugs to police thugs. That’s why they brought in the Manchester-Irish crime family called the Noonans:

Dominic Noonan, who worked with his brother [Damien] for the club, later told documentary-maker Donal MacIntyre that the Haçienda was a ‘tough door’; that gangs from Moss Side, Cheetham Hill and Salford would turn up, all wanting to get in for free, so ‘me and some of the lads who ran the door said enough was enough, let’s take the trouble to them – and we did.’

He and another doorman paid a visit to a pub, his mate with a shotgun, Dominic wielding a machete. ‘One of the gang lad’s dogs was about [dog-lovers and vegetarians might want to look away now] so I just chopped its head off, carried the head inside the pub and put it on the pool table. I more or less told them, “Stay away from the Haçienda or the next time it’ll be a human head,” and they never came back. (“1993”, pg. 260)

That warning for “dog-lovers and vegetarians” is funny, but it might have been added by Hook to something written by someone else. That story about Dominic Noonan and his machete is from one of the mini-histories in italics that punctuate the text (and that appear in Hook’s Joy Division book too). And why do I think Hook wasn’t responsible for the mini-histories? Well, they don’t always read like him and at the beginning of this book, a mini-history describes a controversy over a record-sleeve for Joy Division. It was designed by Peter Saville with a photograph of “the Appiani family tomb” on it. The record came out shortly after Ian Curtis’s death and Factory Records were accused of making a “tasteless reference to the suicide”. The mini-history says: “A bemused Saville pointed out that the design had been finalized prior to Curtis’s death.” (pg. 15) I don’t think Hook wrote that line. Guardianistas use ugly and pretentious words like “finalized” and “prior to”. As I noted previously, he isn’t a Guardianista (so “bemused” isn’t his kind of word either).

If he were a Guardianista, perhaps he would have avoided making some definitely tasteless references like this:

When drum’n’bass and hip hop became popular in 1995, we ended up being unable to hold so-called ‘black-music’ nights because there was so much trouble. Even the police encouraged us not to promote these shows and our bouncers eventually refused to work at them too – and don’t forget that our bouncers were lunatics themselves (in the nicest possible way). But even they said these nights couldn’t be policed. (pg. 238)

As Barry Miles did in one of his autobiographies, Peter Hook is just feeding a stereotype of violence and disorder in the black community. First of all, there is no more violence and disorder in the black community than in any other community. Second, okay, although there is a lot more violence and disorder in the black community, this is caused by hegemonic white racism and the legacy of slavery. And the very violent Noonan family weren’t black, which proves it. So there.

Anyway, this book disappointed me, but I’m not an ideal reader for a book about a legendary night-club. Lots of other people have been and will be. And it’s got a good index. Plus, I learned that the cedilla in Haçienda was (maybe) there to make the “çi” look like the “51” of its catalogue number. Good arty idea, that.

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Bullets and Butterflies

Mad Dog Killers: The Story of a Congo Mercenary, Ivan Smith (Helion / 30° South Publishers 2012)

War is one of the most intense experiences a human being can undergo. Films or computer-games might give you a good idea of what war looks like and sounds like, but they can’t yet tell you what it feels like. This book can. Ivan Smith is a natural story-teller but not a polished writer. That adds to the authenticity of Mad Dog Killers. He’s an ordinary man who saw, did, heard, felt, and smelt some extraordinary things.

But that suggests he’s not so ordinary after all. He had to be tough to fight and survive in the Congo as a mercenary in the Armée Nationale Congolaise during the 1960s. But he isn’t a psychopath, because he’s still haunted by some of the deaths he dealt out or witnessed. Many of his fellow mercenaries were definitely psychopaths. On his own account, he owes his life to one of the worst, a “nerveless and totally ruthless man” called Boeta, who befriended him and watched his back in the barracks and on the battle-field. Boeta comes alive on the page thanks to death. He enjoyed dishing it out and was never happier than in the middle of a fire-fight. He could make night-clubbing go with a bang too:

Boeta eventually signed up for four contracts in a row and on the second one, some months after I had returned to a normal life, he visited a nightclub in Leopoldville [now Kinshasa]. The jazz band refused to play the music he requested. It was in the early hours of the morning so he would have been very drunk. He opened fire on the offending band with an FN [machine-gun]* on automatic fire and killed them all, as well as a couple of other patrons. The one band member turned out to be a relative of a high-ranking government official so Boeta was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. A week later he was back with his Commando; the funds he had accumulated from looting had allowed him to buy his way out of it all. (ch. 4, pg. 43 – *FN = Fabrique Nationale, the Belgian arms-manufacturer)

Later in the book, Boeta makes a visit to a “tatty café” go with a bang too: “The pistol came up and stuck in the waiter’s ear. The shot was muffled and blood and brains sprayed from the exit wound and splashed the wall and roof.” (ch. 11, pg. 155) What had the black waiter done? He’d jokingly claimed to be a “Simba”, or one of the rebels against whom the mercenaries were fighting. So Boeta casually murdered him. Earlier, he and another mercenary had casually murdered a black stranger because no-one could understand what he was saying after he was left with them by some white soldiers from an unknown unit:

“Hey, Harry, you speak Frog, what is he saying?” I asked.

“No, man, it is not French. The bugger is giving me a headache. Wish he would shut up.”

“Good idea. Watch this. Stupid Simba, you should have been quiet.” Boeta got up and beckoned the loudly complaining man over. “Stand over there, you dumb fucker.” He pointed to the edge of the bridge and waved the man to stand there.

Pete, one of the commandos who happened to have been at school with me, but was two years my junior, got up and went to join Boeta.

“Man, I can’t believe that nutcase. Surely the bloke can see it coming?” Harry puffed blue clouds of smoke.

“Don’t think they will do it, will they?” was my anxious complaint.

Boeta and Pete suddenly put up their rifles and fired from the hip, on automatic, long bursts. The complaining man was smashed forward and then lifted by them and thrown over the edge into the swift water below.

“Is that not better?” Boeta called. “No more fucking whining.” (ch. 10, pg. 137)

As Smith notes wryly at the beginning: Boeta became a mercenary because “in the Congo there was no law.” Did the two of them become friends because there was some echo of Boeta’s psychopathy in Smith? I’d assume so, although Boeta nicknamed Smith “Smiler” because of “my sometimes fixed smile” when frightened (pg. 44).

Smith was frightened a lot at the beginning and you can understand why. His childhood and education in South Africa had taught him to shoot and his work in a copper-mine had taught him to face violent death. Or so he thought: “This memoire is … a brief record of a few months in the life of a cocky young man who thought he was afraid of nothing, but who soon learned all about fear.” (Introduction, pg. 6) If the Simba had been better shots or less superstitious, he might not have got out alive. But they were bad shots and reckless fighters, because they often believed that the spells of “medicine-men” had rendered them invulnerable to bullets. Big mistake. In The Godfather (1969), men “sleep with the fishes”. In Mad Dog Killers, they lie with the butterflies:

At the scene of the first contact with the medicine man and company, a fluttering vibration filled the air over the bodies, which were oozing dark blood from multiple gunshot wounds. Busy clouds of brilliant butterflies were whirling over the scene and dense concentrations of the insects sat sipping the oozing blood. The salts in the blood attracted them and the green flies. The butterflies always appeared in a very short time after blood was spilt in the tropical forest. The still moist air quickly took up and conveyed the smell of fresh blood. That cloying scent along with the sharper reek of cordite was filling my lungs as I watched the fluttering insects; they took me back to childhood, to the happy hunting of the earlier days. Then it was back to here and now. (ch. 5, pg. 55)

That’s a surreal description worthy of J.G. Ballard. Africa is a cruel and beautiful place, and the Congo is the dark heart of Africa. The mercenaries often behaved badly in the Congo, but the Simba and the black soldiers in the official Congolese army were usually far worse. Both the Simba and the Congolese army routinely “liberated” towns and villages by murdering the men and raping the women. As Smith says, he spent only “a few months” fighting there, but they’ve stayed with him for the rest of his life. Regrets? He has many. Killing in the hot blood of a fire-fight was one thing, but killing in cold blood was another. Sometimes he’s not sure why he remembers some deaths and not others: “Whatever it was that bothered me about that line of running men still haunts me more than fifty years on. Yet they were just a few of the many I killed.” (ch. 8, pg. 99) Unlike Smith, Boeta enjoyed killing anyone anywhere anytime. That’s why he stayed in. Smith got out.

At least, his body got out, but his mind has often returned. Decades later, he written this book about it, trying to exorcise his demons. The old black-and-white photos add to the sense of another place and another time, but the Congo is still at war and horrors are still taking place there. First come the bullets, then the butterflies.

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Orchid Kid

The Orchid Hunter: A Young Botanist’s Search for Happiness, Leif Bersweden (Short Books 2017)

Was this book inspired by Patrick Barkham’s excellent The Butterfly Isles (2010), in which the author sets out to see all native species of British butterfly in a single year? I assume so. It has a similar premise — “52 species of wild British orchid… one summer to find them all” — and contains a similar mixture of natural history and autobiography. But The Orchid Hunter is a good book in its own right and maybe Barkham was inspired by a find-against-time book I don’t know about.

Either way, if you read both books they’ll enrich and illuminate each other. Butterflies and orchids are both eye-catching, but orchids are much stranger in their subtler, stiller, photosynthetic way. One of the chapter headings here is a quote from the great orchidologist Jocelyn Brooke: “There is, about all orchids, something rather perverse and ambiguous, something even a trifle sinister.” (ch. 10, “The Curse of the Coralroot”, pg. 179) You can see that particularly well in an orchid that doesn’t, in fact, photosynthesize:

The Bird’s-nest Orchid is one of the weirdest plants I’ve ever seen. Completely brown, it appears at first glance to be dead, but a closer examination proves otherwise. Each flower is velvety caramel and has two feet that look as if they’ve been drawn by children: big, clumsy and sticking out sideways. Some plants are still in bud, looking like bizarre trees covered in peanuts. This orchid never produces chlorophyll – the green pigment used in photosynthesis to help produce sugars […] (“Swords of the Hampshire Hangers”, pg. 110)

Instead, Bird’s-nest Orchids, Neottia nidus-avis, parasitize an underground fungus that’s a symbiont of beeches and other trees: “One end of the fungus is attached to the tree, receiving carbon produced by photosynthesis; the other end is attached to the orchid, which is siphoning off this carbon.” Leif Bersweden calls the orchids “outlaws, sneaky thieves who execute their criminality with perfection.” But you could say that the original thief is the tree, whose branches and leaves steal the sun from the sky of smaller plants that try to grow beneath it. Because the Bird’s-nest Orchid isn’t dependent on sunlight, it can grow in the deepest shade.

So can the Ghost Orchid, Epipogium aphyllum, which is a fungus-feeding sciophile that’s even stranger than its relative. But it’s called the Ghost Orchid not just because it’s pale and haunts the shadows, but also because it’s elusive, short-lived and “seldom reappears in the same spot” (pg. 308). Bersweden went “Ghost Hunting”, as he puts it in the title of chapter 18, but the Ghost Orchid got away. He doesn’t succeed in finding one and Epipogium aphyllum is missing from the “Gallery of Gotchas” in the photo section. If it had been there, it still might not have been the strangest orchid on display. It certainly wouldn’t have been the most salacious:

Early Spider Orchids are one of the four species of the genus Ophrys that can regularly be found growing in Britain, the others being Bee, Fly and Late Spider. Their flowers are remarkably insect-like and have a fascinating, yet diabolical sex life. While most plants attract pollinators with the promise of nectar, these orchids lure them in with the promise of bee sex. This deception is accomplished by imitating the scent, appearance and texture of virgin female bees. (“Shakespeare’s Long Purples”, pp. 34-5)

You could say that the Ophrys orchids manufacture floral sex-dolls. Male bees are drawn in by the “alluring female scents”, fooled by the appearance and feel of the flower, and attempt “to mate with the ‘female’, often vigorously and for long periods.” In the process, the male bee acquires “two tiny, sticky pollen sacs”, which he’ll carry off to another Ophrys sex-doll when he gets tired of humping his present partner. At least, that’s what the Ophrys intends. Not that intention is the right word: this botanic deception was created blindly and slowly by natural selection. But nervous systems were definitely involved. And perhaps consciousness was too. The male bees have to smell, see and feel the floral sex-doll, which must have been fine-tuned over evolutionary history to become a better and better mimic of a buxom mate.

The nervous systems of insects and other animals have had a decisive influence on the evolution of mindless plants. Most flowers use shape, scent and colour not to fool insects, but to invite them to a draught of nectar or munch of pollen: “Within minutes of the sun dropping below the horizon, the orchids release an overpowering fragrance into the warm evening air that moths find irresistible” (“Finding the Fragrants”, pg. 201) That’s the Chalk Fragrant Orchid, Gymnadenia conopsea, which grows on “calcareous soils” in the south of England.

Each species of orchid has its own preferences of light, moisture and soil chemistry. Sometimes they’re very particular preferences. This book is almost as much about geology and meteorology as it is about botany. When the cover says “52 species of wild British orchid”, it really does mean “British”. Bersweden visits all five nations of the British Isles, travelling as far south as the Isle of Wight, as far north as the Outer Hebrides to find and photograph orchids, and as far west as the Atlantic coast of Ireland, where he searches for Early Purple Orchids, Orchis mascula, on the Burren, a “barren sea of pale limestone” rising “lunar and desolate, in the north of County Clare.”

At least, it looks barren and desolate from afar. Appearances are deceptive, as one of the best passages in the book reveals. I think it’s an excellent encapsulation of the appeal not just of botany but of natural history in general:

There were plants everywhere. Every crack in the limestone was sprouting green. Common bird’s-foot trefoil, rue-leaved saxifrage, heath dog-violets, milkworts and hawthorn. The snowy-white flowers of mountain everlasting sprang from the pavement, spring gentians bejewelled the grass with an electric blue, and I was left speechless by the sheer number of Early Purple orchids. There were thousands of them, speckling the slope.

Lying down on my stomach, I gazed greedily into a deep crevice and encountered a miniature jungle. Hundreds of plants thronged every crack and root-hold. There were plantains, crane’s-bills, ferns, trefoils and saxifrages. Mosses and liverworts encased the smooth limestone, tiny sporophytic stalks peering upwards like periscopes. They grew over and under one other, making it difficult to distinguish one plant from the next. This was chaotic, unadulterated wilderness. (“Stumped by Ireland’s Mediterranean Orchid”, pg. 52)

You can almost see the plants and feel the limestone beneath your feet. And the plant-names, common and scientific, are almost as rich and strange as the reality. Biology is about nomenclature, not just about nature. As the sub-title of this book reveals, Bersweden is still a “Young Botanist”, so he’s still training his eyes and other senses to make the sometimes minute distinctions between one species and other. In chapter two, he’s “Stumped by Ireland’s Mediterranean Orchid”. But in chapter nine, he’s after an orchid that’s instantly recognizable even to a complete amateur: Cypripedium calceolus, the Lady’s Slipper. It’s the Empress of British orchids, once thought to have been driven into extinction by collectors, then re-discovered in 1930 by the Jarman brothers, two cotton-weavers who worked at a factory in the Yorkshire town of Silsden.

The precise location of their discovery, deep in the Yorkshire Dales, has been kept secret ever since. And the original orchid is still alive, guarded by fences and an on-site warden. Other specimens have been re-introduced to the wild, propagated from domesticated Lady Slippers, and Bersweden visits one of these in the “Gait Burrow Nature Reserve on the Lancashire-Cumbria border”. He’d never seen one in the flesh before:

It’s difficult to describe the emotional impact. Over the years, I’ve read a lot about [these] orchids and ogled hundreds of photos of their unmistakeable flowers, but nothing could have prepared me for that first glimpse of the fragile, jaw-dropping beauty of the Lady’s Slipper. (ch. 9, “The Lady’s Slipper, pg. 169)

But that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to find the only known truly wild specimen in its secret, security-ringed location. “It might be futile,” he says, “but I had to try. […] Somewhere out there, hidden in the secluded folds of the Dales, the Lady’s Slipper was waiting.” He succeeds in his quest – “Suddenly I saw it: a flash of gold between two hazels” – but as he stands “gawking” over the fence at an orchid he “could only just see”, he’s joined by the watchful warden, who regretfully declines to allow him any closer. “Defeated”, he retreats, dreaming of other truly wild specimens that may still lie undiscovered somewhere in the Dales.

Orchids attract obsessive people and Leif Bersweden is definitely one of those: he snatches time during his mother’s fiftieth birthday party to tick the Burnt Orchid, Neotinea ustulata, off his list (ch. 8, “Butterflies and Burnt Tips”, pp. 143-157). Obsession makes for good scientists, but doesn’t necessarily make for good writers. In this case it does: The Orchid Hunter is one of the best natural history books I’ve ever read. It’s also an excellent introduction to what its author calls “the furtive, capricious, enigmatic world of orchids” (pg. 255). That’s in chapter 14, entitled “Queen of the Cotswolds” and devoted to the Red Helleborine, Cephalanthera rubra. But if you want to know exactly what Helleborines are, you have to read the book or look elsewhere: The Orchid Hunter doesn’t, alas, have an index. That’s a big flaw in what is otherwise a very good book.

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#MiToo

Morbidly Miriam: The Mephitic Memoirs of Miriam B. Stimbers, Dr Miriam B. Stimbers (TransVisceral Books 2018)

(This is a guest-review by Dr Benjamin H. Rubinberg)

Miriam Stimbers is, in my opinion, the most important psychoanalyst at work anywhere in the world today. When she began her career, the prospects within academia for psychoanalysis must have seemed less than rosy. Unrelentingly vicious and increasingly underhand attacks had been made on Freud’s golden legacy since the end of the Second World War. We had been told that psychoanalysis was irrational and anti-empirical, authoritarian and misogynistic, that it was a pseudo-scientific cult for the superstitious, simplistic and statistically illiterate.

Miriam responded to these attacks by defiantly taking Freudian techniques to new heights of psychoanalytic sophistication and seismographic subtlety. She began her career detecting “Angst, Abjection and Anthropophagy” in the seemingly carefree music of Suzi Quatro. She went on to unearth “Barbarism, Brutalism and Bestial Bloodlust” in the apparently mild-mannered music of Simon and Garfunkel. More recently, in what is perhaps her greatest triumph to date, she has laid bare “Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism” in the superficially ‘civilized’ novels of Jane Austen. And anyone who has read a single paragraph in any one of these jaw-dropping studies must have asked her- or himself: What is the back-story of the remarkable scholar responsible for such heretical hermeneutics?

Morbidly Miriam: The Mephitic Memoirs of Miriam B. Stimbers is Miriam’s own attempt to answer that question, containing what she describes as “an uncompromising chronicle of my first fifty years on Earth.” The opening fifteen of those years were difficult ones, to put it mildly. Miriam was born in the notoriously rough-hewn Scottish city of Glasgow and had authentically atrocious “Parents from Hell.” Both were alcoholics, both were addicted to violence, both seemed to thrive on chaos and conflict. Miriam admits that she may well have inherited her own “committed contrarianism” from her “tram-conductress” mother, but she says that memories like the following still have the power to chill her blood at several decades’ distance:

Ma stood swaying in the door of the living-room, flushed with a mixture of cheap whiskey and vindictive triumph.

“Weel, Ah’ve done it!” she announced.

“Done whit, ye auld bitch?” responded Pa with a belch, scarcely troubling to look up from where he sat slumped in his armchair, listening to the racing results on our battered 1950s radio.

“Ah’ve joint the fuckin’ Tories!”

That attracted Pa’s attention.

“The fuck ye have!”

“Aye, an’ Ah have at that.”

“Ah’ll no have nae fuckin’ Tory under this roof!”

“An’ there ye’re wrang, ye auld cunt. ’Cos Ah’m a fuckin’ Tory an’ Ah’m under this roof right noo, see?”

“Weel, then, ye can clear yer fuckin’ airse off oot of it!”

“The fuck Ah will!”

“Ye will an’ all, woman, or Ah’ll boot ye oot!”

Most days, Pa would have thrown something hard and heavy by now, but I could see him squinting and blinking first at Ma in the doorway, then at the bottles sitting on the floor by his chair. He was seeing double again. (ch. 2, “Ye Can Take the Girrul Oot-a Glasgae…”, pp. 23-4)

That episode from Miriam’s home-life is horrifying on many levels, no? But it was not so bad as it might seem. Despite her shocking avowal, Miriam’s mother was being deceitful: she had not in fact joined “the Tories,” that is, Britain’s loathsomely racist and white-supremacist Conservative party. She was merely seeking to provoke her husband into a fight. In this, as so often before and later, she succeeded and the young Miriam was soon once again ringing for a pair of ambulances and mopping blood off the carpet. It is little wonder that Miriam sought a refuge from the violence and vindictiveness of her home-life in the calmer, kinder and caringer world of books and literature, nor that she should have set her heart on winning a scholarship and becoming the first person in her extended family of “boozers and brawlers” to attend university.

The scholarship – “my magic carpet to a better world,” as Miriam calls it – took her to Merton College, Oxford, and introduced her to some of the most exciting and up-to-date developments in literary theory. But she had already lost her heart to a certain roguish revolutionary from Vienna: Herr Sigmund Freud. Miriam has proved unflinchingly faithful to Freud and Freudianism right to the present day. Her move from Britain to the United States has merely strengthened her commitment and deepened her respect. Indeed, on the day that disaster struck her new homeland and a “bouffant buffoon” (as Miriam cuttingly puts it) was elected to the White House, she says that she found herself “literally praying to my wise old Meister.”

Despair was nevertheless an ever-present temptation in the wake of Trump’s “toxic triumph,” but Miriam says that she was determined to remain strong both for the the planet’s sake and for the sake of her life-partner Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum, who is, in her own words, “a proud member of the Black-African Diaspora (despite the racist assumptions made by sickeningly many people on first hearing his name).” Miriam has never taken the comfortable route or sought the quiet life. “It would have been very easy,” she writes of her trans-Atlantic move, “to take advantage of white privilege, to sleep with powerful white men, and to coast to superficial success in America. I could not do that. I will not do that. Hier stehe Ich – Ich kann nicht anders.”

She’s right. She won’t do that. But we can be sure that she will continue to thrust the boundaries of psychoanalysis outward, upward, and downward, just as we can be sure that she will continue to alternately intrigue her adventurous readers and traumatize her timid colleagues. Miriam Stimbers is the psychoanalyst of the century and Morbidly Miriam is a must-read autobiography for fans old and new alike.

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A Seriously Stimbulating Stimbibliography

• Penetrating the (Pernicious) Portal: Towards a Pre-Anthropology of the Knock-Knock Joke (Oxford University Press 1992)
• Miscegenation, Misogyny, and (Mephitic) Mimesis: Towards a Post-Anthropology of the Lightbulb Joke (O.U.P. 1995)
• Can the Cannibal? Aspects of Angst, Abjection and Anthropophagy in the Music of Suzi Quatro, 1974-1986 (University of Nebraska Press 2004)
• Doubled Slaughter: Barbarism, Brutalism and Bestial Bloodlust in the Music of Simon and Garfunkel, 1965-2010 (Serpent’s Tail 2007)
• Law of the ’Saw: Terror, Teratology, and Tmetic Tenebrosity in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (U.N.P. 2010)
• Kentucky Fried Freud: Candid Confessions of a 21st-Century Psychoanalyst… (TransVisceral Books 2012)
• Re-Light My Führer: Nausea, Noxiousness and Neo-Nazism in the Music of Take That, 1988-2007 (U.N.P. 2013)
• Base Citizens Raping: Revulsion, Repulsion and Rabidity in the Music of the Bay City Rollers, 1972-2002 (U.N.P. 2014)
• Botty: An Unnatural History of the Backside (TransVisceral Books 2014) (reviewed here)
• Jane in Blood: Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism in the Novels of Jane Austen (U.N.P. 2014)
• Underground, Jehovahground: Ferality, Fetidity and Fundamentalist Phantasmality in the Music of the Wombles, August 1974-January 1975 (TransVisceral Books 2015)
• Komfort Korps: Cuddles, Calmatives and Cosy Cups of Cocoa in the Music of Korpse-Hump Kannibale, 2003-2010 (U.N.P. 2015)

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Caveat Lector

Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh, Auberon Waugh (Century 1991)

If the Holocaust continues to increase its hold on the hearts and minds of all right-thinking folk, it seems quite possible that Auberon Waugh’s body will one day be dug up and put on trial for the disrespect shown by its former occupant, before being ritually burnt and scattered to the four winds.

Unless, that is, other professional victims get their hands on it first. AW told jokes about the most inappropriate subjects, from the “three million years of persecution” suffered by the Jews to the graves of still-born West Indian infants, and remarked of himself that his “own small gift” was for “making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear” (pg. 215). Contemplating his use of this gift and “all the people I have insulted”, he later admits to being “mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist” (229).

But it is the august author of his existence who will concern more readers, and certainly no aficionado of Evelyn Waugh can afford to neglect the autobiography of his eldest son. Waugh père put on a performance for the world and even for his friends, and this book is rather like seeing behind the scenes at a play. Readers will see EW from the wings, as it were, though they should always remember that AW inherited his father’s love of fantasy as well as much of his literary talent. Of one episode from his military service AW remarks: “I have told the story so often now that I honestly can’t remember whether it started life as a lie” (105).

This may also apply to the infamous “three bananas” devoured with sugar and “almost unprocurable” cream by his father under the “anguished eyes” of his children, to whom the fabled fruit had been sent in the depths of post-war austerity (67). The story is a dramatic way of illustrating AW’s judgement that EW’s “chief defect was his greed” and of explaining why AW “never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.” It may be untrustworthy for that very reason.

It may also have been an act of posthumous revenge, working off some of the resentment and even dislike AW felt for his father before leaving home. In 1944, dragged away from his games to meet EW, who was home on leave, AW “would gladly have swapped him for a bosun’s whistle” (30); later, he faced the problem of living with a father who set the emotional climate of his entire household:

The dejection which was liable to seize him at any moment — sparked off by little more than a bad joke, a banal sentiment, a lower-middle-class epithet — made him awkward company at times. When he was in the grips of a major depression, or melancholy as he called it, he was unendurable. (36) … He was a small man — scarcely five foot six in his socks — and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality. (43)

But he did not think his father could have been “pleased by the effect he produced on other people”, and concluded that he “spent his life seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him” — and then usually getting drunk with them, “as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations” (43). Their own relations were marked by “distinct cordiality” (112) in the last five years of EW’s life: after suffering a near-fatal accident on National Service in Cyprus, AW even wrote “a maudlin, deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him” and sent it to his bank to be released “in the event of my predecease” (112).

Despite this, EW’s death “lifted a great brooding awareness not only from the house but from the whole of existence” (186). That presence played encores, however, as when AW experienced misgivings about his apostasy from Catholicism:

It is hard to believe that these kindergarten assemblies bear much relation to the ancient institution of the Church as it survived through the Renaissance. The new Mickey Mouse church … is surely not a reduction of the old religion. It has nothing to do with it, being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded. Or so it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father’s fury rather than Divine Retribution which I dread. (pg. 187)

These passages will reinforce the image of EW that readers bring to the book; elsewhere, AW may contradict it. It’s surprising to read how EW entertained the “Stinchcombe Silver Band” every Christmas at Piers Court and got “great roars of laughter out of them as he ribbed them about their tipsiness” (49). But AW claims that while the “common touch was certainly not something he cultivated … in rather a surprising way, when he needed it, he had it”. He then defends EW against the accusation, levelled by the real-life model for “Trimmer” of the War trilogy, that EW had been “detested by the men who served under him”. Not so: the reverse was true, according to correspondence AW received after reviewing Trimmer’s autobiography for Books and Bookmen.

The mischief-making apparent in that choice of reviewer is something else that readers may find enlightening, because Will This Do? is describing a particular British class and culture. On his National Service AW saw two Wykehamists rejected by their school-fellows after failing the War Office Selection Board. He noted “the ruthlessness of the British establishment” and the “cruelty” that “flourishes in the law and wherever public school Englishmen are given power over each other”.

AW reveals the limitation of his perspective here, perhaps, because ruthlessness and cruelty are not a monopoly of public school Englishmen, but his readers’ understanding of his father’s novels may be deepened by his descriptions of those things in action, his own amongst them.

AW also offers insights into Catholic psychology. When he reveals one of his father’s secrets, he has to cover up his role after the secret finds its way into the papers:

‘It was not I who sold you to them, although I have a theory as to who did.’ Readers will observe how, with typical Catholic casuistry, there is no actual untruth in this letter, as I had not actually sold the information to Rose, merely told it to him by way of passing the time of day. (127-8)

And he muses on what might have been had he taken a different degree:

My exhibition [scholarship examination] had been in English, but my father advised me that this was a girl’s subject, unsuited to the dignity of a male. Lord David Cecil had been rather upset when I told him this, staying at Portofino before my first Oxford term. I had forgotten he was Professor of English at Oxford. … Perhaps I should have stayed the course in English, instead of finding myself lumbered with this rubbishy PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics]. (148)

For the immediate future, however, the most significant passage in the book may be a description from AW’s National Service during the Cyprus emergency of 1958, when the island’s Greek inhabitants wanted union with Greece and its Turkish inhabitants wanted secession. A party of Greeks were “dropped on the Nicosia-Kyrenia main road” to make their way home after “questioning and document-checking”. Unfortunately, they were dropped near a village of Turks, who mistook them for a war-party:

The Turks poured out of the village and quite literally hacked them to pieces. It was a very messy business. Nine Greeks were killed and many others mutilated. Hands and fingers were all over the place and one officer wandered around, rather green in the face, holding a head and asking if anyone had seen a body which might fit it. (103-4)

EW ended his preface to Alfred Duggan’s Count Bohemond (1964), set during the Crusades, with the claim that “It is highly appropriate that this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms against the infidel.” His own son saw the conflict beginning again, as predicted by Hilaire Belloc, the “terrifying old man with a huge white beard” (16) whom AW met in extreme youth in his maternal grandmother’s house at Pixton. Will AW’s maturity prove to have fallen in the sun-lit patch between the shadows of the Second World War and serious racial and religious conflict in Europe?

If it does, EW’s shade may raise a shadowy glass in Elysium. As Britons can see from its vigorous survival in Northern Ireland, religion thrives on hatred and conflict and, Machometo adiuvante, the Church may yet throw off the leaden cope of The Second Vatican Council. Despite the despair such reforms brought to his father before his death, AW’s final, objective judgment is that “Evelyn Waugh detested the modern world but did rather well out of it” (123).

He himself, blessed with a more equable temperament and unridden by the demon of “melancholy”, could be said to have done even better but to have left a less enduring mark. Nevertheless, one of the charms of his autobiography is that it preserves some Evelynian ephemera: had they not been recorded here, history might have lost the handwritten Augustan prose instructing visitors on the vagaries of a lavatory at Piers Court and the Yardley’s Lavender Hair Tonic that EW put on his head when he changed for dinner (43).

EW writes in The Loved One (1948) of how death strips “the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence” from the body, leaving it “altogether smaller than life-size”. Will This Do? preserves a few tufts of his own pelt and although as the years pass the book will, alas, be read increasingly out of an interest in the father, not the son, AW had no illusions about his own importance in the scheme of things. It’s true that he may have laid booby-traps of fantasy and exaggeration in the stories he tells about his father, but what more appropriate rite of filial pietas could he have performed?

[A review first published in 2006.]

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