David Stacton: He did it his way

David Stacton 1923-1968

Last Saturday the Guardian Review kindly published a longish piece of mine about the late American novelist David Stacton, a swathe of whose novels I’ve recently reissued as Faber Finds. 

It’s always a pleasure to occupy the Guardian’s retrospective 'Re-Readings' slot (I was last there with this piece on Yukio Mishima’s The Seaof Fertility) and it's a good fit for for me since, for better or worse, I tend now to re-read rather more than I read...

David Stacton is a rare and strange and special case, and certainly the sort of writer about whom one wants to spread the word. As I say in the piece, his subjects included Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Lord Nelson and Ludwig of Bavaria, Cardinal Richlieu and Axel Oxenstierna, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. And I just don’t believe you can read that without getting at least a little bit curious.

In describing Stacton as an ‘ambitious’ novelist – in the creative rather than career sense – I want very much to stress the inspiring example he still offers to those who would write fiction. In an age of so much teaching of creative writing, so much focus on storytelling conventions, on shaping personal experience into 'pitching your book', bringing the story to market and building the author’s career/brand – the whole industry now devoted to realising the novels often thought to lie inside each one of us… it’s useful, now and then, to be reminded of a writer who set out to do grand and astounding and unconventional things on a page, beyond even his own ken, and without first asking anyone’s permission.

I certainly don't mean to say that writers don't benefit greatly from skilled tutelage and/or by extending themselves to the imagined reader - only that once in a while it's good to have someone around who makes it up pretty much all by themselves.

Stacton’s incredible productivity was such that you have to believe he loved writing (or felt bound to it) as much as any scribe who ever lived. Certainly it’s difficult to imagine there was any time when he wasn’t deeply immersed in writing a book or else researching it. Rewriting was probably as distressing for him as it is for most working novelists, but he brought it on himself: he had the exceedingly common writer’s self-delusion that his next project would be relatively ‘short’ and delivered on time, but his ambitions simply didn’t tend that way. 

As he wrote or edited he always kept one or more grand and enthralling project on his horizon simultaneously. When I sifted Stacton’s archived correspondence with his Faber editor, the great Charles Monteith - whom he was very fortunate to have as his champion - I laughed aloud to read Stacton mentioning almost off-handedly to Monteith, ‘I thought recently it would be fun to take the Popes on whole – a big book about their personal eccentricities...’ Big that certainly would have been. But had he lived longer he might have done it, you know. He did nearly everything else.

One last embroider on what I mention in the piece about Stacton’s mind being temperamentally inclined to bold patterns and designs – such that every novel had to form part of a trilogy on a theme, the trilogies themselves interlocking within the larger oeuvre... This is the mark of an artist who liked to set seals upon things. And in 1954, at the very outset of his relationship with Faber, Stacton sent the firm a ‘logotype’ he had drawn, an artful entwining of his initials, and asked that it be included as standard in the prelims of his novels (‘Can I be humoured about my colophon as a regular practice?’) 

A tad grand in one so young, perhaps - but Faber thought it worth obliging him, as have I with these new reissues, each of which bear the Stacton colophon as shown.

Economic Growth: Desperately seeking 'some thrilling and utterly unexpected change'

Cameron at Davos: (AP Photo/Keystone, Laurent Gillieron)

When I'm after some pointed comment on economics I often read Chris Dillow, the avowed Marxist who writes a column for Investor’s Chronicle and a blog (rather more noticeably Marxisant) called Stumbling and Mumbling. He posts a lot, always provocatively; but with the UK economy shrinking over another quarter – this piece from a US vantage in The Atlantic, ‘Britain's Economy Is a Disaster and Nobody Is Entirely Sure Why’, pretty well sums up the dismal mood - I'm reminded that I've kept revisiting a post on Dillow’s blog from August 2011, ‘The Growth Problem’, which still seems to these eyes to tell the whole predicament. There's no good bolthole for capital to flock to, the Eurozone isn’t buying, generous credit is for yesterday, the coming industries we ought to have nurtured and developed we lag hopelessly behind in, our austerity - whatever you make of its degree - isn’t working, because none of the conditions under which it’s worked previously are now present - and so on. Last week Dillow suggested he believes the economy is being further depressed by ‘irrational animal spirits that drive [investor] sentiment and capital spending.’

Another economics commentator I look to a lot is Merryn Somerset Webb at Money Week, who is not a Marxist, or at least I doubt she is. She ended 2012 on a note not so far from that Dillow sounded in 2011: 'It is perfectly obvious that, barring some thrilling and utterly unexpected change in our national circumstances, we should continue to be in a low growth environment for the foreseeable future. It is also pretty obvious that there isn’t much we can do about it.'

And there was me thinking I was a black pessimist... In the past I may have sounded sarky on this page about Ed Balls’ Five Point Plan, but then the leading critiques of it have argued that Balls isn’t indicating willingness to borrow/spend what it might take; and for various reasons, he’s not going to get a chance to do that. As for the government, I have in recent times been quite sympathetic to David Cameron’s arguments that the UK must ‘rebalance its economy’ and ‘pay its way in the world’, but now I think – trying to be charitable to myself – that I’ve been wasting my own time, talking a load of wishful rot. I guess these are nihilistic times. Here's to the surpassing of rock-bottom expectations, then - or else to that thrilling, bolt-out-of-the-blue change...

Star Wars: If they'd given me the 'Episode 7' gig...

Probably the main emotions I associate with the Star Wars movies – such a hot thing back when I was 6 years old, not to say ever since, and fervently so again now the resumption of the series has been announced – are vague disappointment and anti-climax of the childish kind, a bit like the taste of flat Coca-Cola? Even by today’s standards few motion pictures have ever been so aggressively and unremittingly marketed; a process that’s not always compatible with innocent ideas of escapist fun.

I think that’s why, when I was kindly escorted to see Star Wars (‘Episode 4’, as we never knew it) at the age of 6 – I was quite puzzled to find that what was on the screen hardly lived up to what had been going on in my head, having already seen tie-in comic books, picture books, kiddie-novelisations and breathless reports on the whole phenom by John Craven’s Newsround and Frank Bough’s Nationwide. I suppose one learned something there, before one could give it words, about how the excitement of the human imagination lives on its own and seeks objects to attach itself to. The main point is, I’m certain I enjoyed playing with Star War toys (i.e. a great deal) vastly more than watching Star Wars.

Those, then, are the big twinned disappointments of the Star Wars thing: its vanguard role in the modern-day science of Selling to Kids, together with the variable quality of the movies lurking in back. Again, memory is vulnerable (I was 12 when I saw it) but I find it hard to believe viewers of any age weren’t groaning through Return of the Jedi (‘Episode 6’), with its pat resolutions and endless talk and insufferable fur-ball cuteness . With the second trilogy of movies that came out between 1999 and 2005, pictures I admit I’ve only glimpsed on small screens, even the diehard fans seemed to break out in revolts of distress, despondency, rage.

My one clear thought about Star Wars around that time came when me and a small film crew were scuttling around Denmark making a Channel 4 documentary on the Danish Dogme 95 film movement, during the production of which I was constantly being told by sneering US and UK film journalists that this vaunted avant-garde was just a shallow marketing ploy to sell a slate of low-budget Danish movies. That critique never looked more kneejerk-insular to me than when our crew stopped for supper at a motorway McDonalds outside Copenhagen, and with our Happy Meals we were served, quite irrespective of our wishes, a little set of plastic tat promoting Star Wars Phantom Menace (‘Episode 1’). There’s marketing and there’s Marketing, see.

But of course I’m not here to bury Star Wars. I suspect for many viewers, and not just apostates like me, it’s the indisputable excellence of The Empire Strikes Back (‘Episode 5’) that provides most of the abiding images of the series. I do recall going to see that one (aged 9 this time) as the first occasion 'going to the movies' felt both giddily exciting and also a bit painful in the heart vicinity – rather like how falling in love would shortly come to feel. And one needn’t summon critical respectability to this, but Pauline Kael’s championing of Empire as the best American movie of its year (a year that included Raging Bull) was quite telling. What’s good about the picture, as with most good pictures, is its writing (by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, veteran of the Hawksian western and film noir) and directing (by Irvin Kershner, who began his career making smaller ‘personal’ films, and nearly turned this one down), and its production design, in the fullest sense. 

Pauline Kael was also very big on the movie’s visual-aural texture – Darth Vader’s armour lit for maximum gleam and menace, the venerable green-fuzz aura around Yoda, the affecting sounds of Chewbacca’s deep mournful howl and Luke’s grim whimpers after his sword-hand is lopped off. Empire was shot by Peter Suschitzy, whose son I knew slightly at university, and who went on to become David Cronenberg’s preferred DP. The film is properly dark, hard-edged, a really satisfying pop version of all that mythological stuff George Lucas professed to love in the creative anthropology of Joseph Campbell.

And now the Star Wars series is cranking up again, three more movies resuming the storyline after the events (!?) of Return of the Jedi. They’ve gone and hired Michael Arndt to write it and, professionally, I accept that – I wouldn’t have been the man for the job, my screenwriting CV hasn’t got quite the same lustre as his, I doubt I would have aced the pitch meeting... However I’m happy to offer Mr Arndt these tips on ‘which way to take it’:

1. Stay dark. Whoever the hero is this time, undermine him, menace him, keep in mind the limits of heroism, make everything come at a cost, such that triumph feels like perplexing failure. After all, the seeming point of the series has been that there are continual reversals of fortune in this war between The Force and the Dark Side. You need to preserve a sliver of ambiguity there about which is which.

2. Remember Hitchcock’s maxim: the better the villain, the stronger the picture. No Darth Vader this time out. But you need someone interestingly threatening, not called Darth.

3. Keep it mythological. Go Greek, go Shakespeare, go Wagner, go folktale. But avoid attempts at contemporary resonance (e.g. about the corruption of great republics and whatnot, when what your story proposes is an ‘evil empire’ of cosmic proportions.)

4. By all means ‘feed the theme-parks’ with white-knuckle-ride set piece sequences (which even partially redeemed Return of the Jedi.) But please think less about feeding the toy stores with opportunities for marketing soft gonks to pre-schoolers.

5. Kill Han Solo and kill him well, as Harrison Ford has long seemed to wish – the mere threat of which did so much to distinguish Empire Strikes Back. Clearly there is potential in ‘Episode 7’ for an Ibsen-like plotline of the aged warrior summoned out of brooding retirement by the woman from his past who urges him to take a final but fatal stand.

6. Try and cast older actors with proper voices, who can cope with the kind of fanciful dialogue these pictures seem to require. Star Wars got so much mileage from Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. Episode 3, conversely, took the mystery of how Anakin Skywalker came to be imprisoned in Darth Vader’s armour then voided it of interest by casting Hayden Christiansen. (A proportion of these proper actors should be British/Irish but don’t have to be the biggest British/Irish movie stars of the moment...)

7. These stories require characters, not stereotypes, however much the audience likes to give the impression they prefer the latter. A big trick of them, it seems to me, is how to pace a character’s slide from good to evil, or their ascent in the other direction. Even Billy Dee Williams was briskly effective in Empire as the unreformed scoundrel who betrays Harrison Ford. (He got turned round very swiftly in Jedi, but I suspect that had a bit to do with saving Williams from a lot of abuse at fan conventions.)

8. Nothing is written, everything is permitted: didn’t Lucas invent quite late on the whole wheeze of Darth Vader being Luke’s father? And thank god for that. Anything twisting of previously given information is forgivable in the cause of making things less boring.

9. Really you need a family at the centre of things, with tensions therein, and... but, what am I saying? Over to you, Michael Arndt. Disney, I am available for Episode 8, probably.

Political dilemmas: even harder than you may think

One reason this blog fell into disuse in the autumn of 2010 was that I had formerly employed it to pontificate quite a bit about politics. But it’s not been a good last few years for politics... and I’ve lost a bit of fight for the subject (for which, inter alia, I like to blame Ed Miliband.) That said, in the autumn of 2010 I also got onto Twitter, and became accustomed every morning to reading political opinions, long and short, with which I agreed, and found to be more robustly and eloquently expressed than my own. (And I didn't even have to pay for them - talk about a guilty pleasure.)

The stuff I don’t agree with, meanwhile, I find I mostly haven’t the will to tackle. I was a bit nettled last week, though, by this New Statesman piece from Rafael Behr – and not, you understand, solely on account of the gruesome photo that tops it off.

It gets underway well enough, seeming to be a piece on Labour ‘recoiling from the whole spectacle of government on a shoestring’ – a problem on which Hopi Sen has been doing some hard thinking for a while. Behr further ventures that the British public ‘do seem grimly reconciled to the idea that politics, which used to be about favours bestowed from the Exchequer, is now about pain selectively inflicted’ – a debatable point, but one that Janan Ganesh also makes quite a lot.

However this is what Behr’s piece winds round to (with my emphases):

"There is a caricature of Labour’s public-sector debate that pits the frugal, reforming idolators of Tony Blair against spendthrift, reactionary disciples of Brown. The distinction is increasingly meaningless. Orthodox Blairites are a rare and neutered breed and even they accept that Balls, for all that the Tories paint him as Brownism incarnate, is wedded to budget discipline. The real tension is both subtler and more profound. It is between the need to defend Labour’s legacy of investment in public services and the impulse to imagine different ways of effecting social change. It is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the abstract principle that government can be the citizen’s friend while also attacking the current government as a menace to society. It is the battle between Brown and Blue shades of Labour which remains unresolved, because Ed Miliband is personally steeped in both."

You could nearly imagine Miliband a brooding colossus, astride two great clashing ideas... In fact what Behr describes at the end there is not a ‘dilemma’, not by any definition. A dilemma is a choice between two more or less equally undesirable options: it’s what politics is mostly made out of. But for Labour it is a perfectly pleasant and natural thing – the usual day’s work – to offer itself as the citizen’s good angel, while pointing out that the other lot all have horns on their heads.

I suppose if you accept Ed Ball’s conversion to fiscal toughness, and also feel that his 5-point plan for growth is what the Coalition really should have been doing since 2010, then you could also take a view that Labour has progressed from its recent and rather backward stint in government (and from its nominal leader in that ‘moment’) and is now in ‘profound’ contemplation, even if only about new ways to keep on saying the things it's always liked to say. But if the unfinished Thoughts of Chairman Brown and the pamphlets of Blue Labour are really all that Ed Miliband has to mull over for inspiration then I can't see that this current version of The Party is engaged in any kind of dialectical process at all.

Say what you like about Hitchens...

The posthumous intellectual reputation of Christopher Hitchens still comes under regular assault: sometimes ‘more in sorrow than anger’ blah blah, sometimes with the avowed intention of nailing some lasting badge of shame onto his collected writings. No-one can be surprised by this, since he was consistently repudiated by aggrieved ex-co-thinkers of the left while he was alive – a little bit at first because of his loathing for Clinton, then a lot on account of his advocacy for the ousting of Saddam.

Unlike some admirers of Hitchens’ writing I don’t find any of the attacks made on either side of his death to be outrageous, indecent etc. Hitchens could certainly dish it out, and didn’t tarry much if the target of his wrath was recently deceased or clearly en route to the terminus. He seemed to feel these things needed saying regardless, and that it was ‘important to have the right enemies’, which will tend to keep you speaking freely. (Also - does it need saying? - he wasn't right about every last thing, and not everything he wrote was end-to-end brilliant; and if you wrote as much as Hitchens did then there will, and must, be blood.)

Evidently his skin stayed thick and his wit keen during the cancer. Recently I watched an interview he gave to Laurie Taylor for Sky Arts in 2011, in which Taylor put the familiar question of whether Hitchens was bothered about the kind of intellectual company he kept post-Iraq (also, unspoken but clear, whether he missed the warm exchange of fraternal regards with Chomsky, Tariq Ali et al.) ‘It takes a lot to make me cry’, Hitchens shot back, confidently if a tad wearily, before Taylor could complete the thought.

A while back I was given and enjoyed reading Hitchens’ Mortality, the short book of thoughts and notes made as he neared the end. All of it is expressed so candidly, searchingly, elegantly that I would hope to read nothing else of cancer until the great history to come of how its cure was found... (That said, I do wish I could take a razorblade and chop out Mortality’s slack preface by Graydon Carter, who – perhaps imagining himself as generous as was Time to Paul Claudel – describes Hitchens’ opinions on Iraq as ‘curious’, twice in the space of a few pages.)

With Mortality I must also regretfully accept this is the final Hitchens. I have come to terms, too, with a longstanding feeling that after September 11 2001 it just wasn’t – couldn’t be – as much fun to read him as it had been Before. (One more reason to wish Osama Bin Laden a hot place in a dream Hades.) The retooling of Hitchens’ regular Slate column under the banner of 'Fighting Words' only confirmed that he now felt there was only one political issue worth writing (and voting) on. It was needful, and he did it well, though the fierceness of the disagreements on that single issue seemed always to be lagging behind actual conditions ‘on the ground’. After 2001 Hitchens did begin to write more about literature than before, which made for diversity, and was all highly erudite, but not really the thing that had made him a must-read in the journals where I first discovered his stuff...

That’s it, see. When I now sit and conjure up the pleasure of reading Hitchens it’s all from the 1990s: his Nation 'Minority Reports' warning and urging over Bosnia (‘for the last time...’), or even (lest we forget) welcoming a Labour leader he first thought ‘unbearably Lite.’ Or his long LRB essays, bashing Isaiah Berlin over Vietnam or hailing Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. His interviewing Mailer, for that matter, in the New Left Review, and stressing the great man’s adherence to ‘an idea of the Left’ – an effort that now feels like less of the absolute essence.

I suppose what I hate most is starting to sound the slightest bit like George Galloway, who, in one of his attempts to debate Hitchens over Iraq, came out with a notably pathetic sorrow-over-anger spiel lamenting whatever befell the Hitchens he once loved - the guy who had such a store of snappy, quotable, unimprovably moralistic one-liners about (mostly American) political creeps, phonies and psychopaths?

It’s a mawkish tendency in myself, I know. You have to wipe your nose and move on (though not MoveOn.) There needs to be ‘a nuanced goodbye to all that.’