Friday, 28 September 2012
How To Write The Thick of It
Razor-sharp. Incisive. Horribly accurate. Fact imitating fiction. Now you can write your very own episode of The Thick of It.
1) You'll need pop culture references: endless pop culture references: "It's like that third Tron movie that no-one's waiting for", "the Scottish Simon Cowell", "Like a fucking Will Self lecture", "we are the Gallagher brothers of politics", "okay, let's Macintyre this - stand up", "then it's just me, the Kindle and Jodi Picoult"', "Fuck off, Bagpuss", "When I've finished with him he'll look like Mel Gibson's fucking Jesus", "Nicola's gone all Jeremy Kyle", "You're the fucking shittest James Bond ever - you're David fucking Niven", "That was a bit annoying. And hilarious. Like Russell Brand. You want to hate him, but he’s just funny", "not the sofa - what are you, Lorraine Kelly?"' "You couldn't keep the cast of Glee out", "it's like when Queen lost Freddie - no-one could replace him, certainly not Paul Rodgers", "Oi, James fucking May, it was you who sprayed the private information about the school, wasn't it? Like Jenson Button shaking up a magnum of piss". Naming things people like is a gift for the writer of dialogue: it saves time.
2) Swearing is automatically funny. This is useful because you can adapt it to any situation: if someone is presenting poppies at the cenotaph and makes a mess of it, you can create lines like "bollocking poppy wank" and "she is officially a cenotwat". Not to forget "Shitehead Revisited", "Fuck off Mr Chips" and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Cunt". The trick is to add the swear word at the right moment. This makes it ideal for quoting on Twitter or at work the next day.
3) Another useful technique is to take an established name, and add a twist to make it fit one one of the characters: "how's Martina Luther King?", "where's Hale and Pacemaker?", "Lord Bonnie Longford" "Lucille Ballbag" "Benny fucking Hendrix", "Where's Dame Ellen McArseache?", "Indiana Murray and the bum-dildo of vengeance".
4) Despite the richly talented cast, you don't need to give them too much to work with. Don't bother with the characterisation, nuance and inventive comic detail you find in their other work such as Knowing Me Knowing You, The Day Today or Getting On. What's that got to do with satire? That's just art. All you need in the way of characterisation is the odd reference to how the characters are unhappily married or don't get to have sex very often and have to resort to porn. The character of Phil Smith is a masterful example here.
5) There are two ways of writing dialogue: one is to have a character make references to the other's sexual failures, the other is for them to suggest they are gay.
Here's the first:
Phil: (producing a bottle of champagne)
It was in my desk drawer - I was saving it for something special.
Emma:
What, like losing your virginity?
Phil:
I've done that in style, actually - if my penis could talk...
Emma:
Yeah, it'd say "I'm lonely, where is everyone, let me out of this coffin..."
(series 4, ep 1)
Here's a couple of examples of the other:
Phil:
While Peter is absent I am his surrogate: the King's hand
Adam:
Yeah - finish him off with that hand as well, do you? Prick.
(series 4, ep 3)
Malcolm: (interrupting an argument between Ollie and Phil)
I love it, I love it, it's the pre-match sparring for the big supergayweight title fight, eh? (mimes boxing) Ok Oliver, wipe away the precum, you've got some work to get on with.
(series 3, ep 4)
6) if the ad-lib hasn't come off, keep ad-libbing: non-sequiturs are funny, particularly if you keep adding to them and commenting on the fact that they are non-sequiturs. Here's some examples:
Fleming:
What I need to know is, are you solid?
Nicola:
Yes, I'm completely... I'm as solid as...as the proverbial, as a - as a rock, As a rock-hard....as a - as a sailor's...wang on shoreleave."
(series 3, episode 8)
Phil:
You're like the man who fucked the monkey that gave us AIDS, that's who you are!
Ollie:
(Incredulous) I'm like the man who did what - who fucked the monkey (laughs) that gave us AIDs?
Phil:
That's right: you keep saying "it wasn't me, it wasn't me" and there's monkey shit on your balls, not mine.
(series 3 episode 4)
Nicola:
Great, thank you, Steve fucking "oooh Nicola" Fleming
Ollie:
Yeah... He is a fucking... [pause] ninny isn't he?
(series 3, episode 7)
Adam:
Glen, you're a marvel, you know - you're like a modern-day Jeeves...only...not...modern...day...you're like Jeeves...only not as good."
(Series 4, ep 3)
See how the actors' unhappy way of delivering the dialogue, as if the characters were struggling to articulate themselves well, can be used to excuse what might otherwise seem rather feeble material.
7) Comedy can be created by clinging to the phrase a person has just used:
Fleming: Glen, are you on top of your game?
Glen: I'm, er [splutters] I am above my game, I'm in a geo-stationary orbit way above it looking down going "Hello game, it's Glen!"
(series 3 episode 8)
Julius:
You've done some pretty awful things to me in my time but this takes the bloody biscuit - and you've pissed on that biscuit and I've got to eat it. Well, here's the news Malcolm, I will not eat the pissy biscuit!
Malcolm:
Sam! No pissy biscuits.
(Series 3 ep 8)
Ben:
The leader of the Opposition is in that room, Malcolm, practicing walking, I mean, baby horses can walk - from the womb. She's one nil down to a pony.
Malcolm:
A pony isn't a baby horse. It's a foal: a fucking foal is a baby horse.
Ben:
Right, our guest tonight on "I don't give a fuck about baby horses is me.
[later in the episode]
Ben:
shall we get a pony to challenge her?
Malcolm:
It's not a fucking pony, it's a fucking foal.
(series 4 ep2)
Everyone knows that's what dialogue sounds like in comedy.
Can you do that? Let's try right now, shall we?:
Teri looks in the biscuit tin) Why do you always have to eat all the penguins?
Olly:
Why are you always asking me about the Penguin count? You're a Penguin Nazi
Teri:
You're calling me a Nazi Penguin?
Ollie:
No, I'm calling you a Penguin Nazi
Teri:
What's the difference?
People will be tweeting " 'penguin Nazi'! lol #thethickofit"' in no time. It could be the new "quiet bat people" (series 4 ep 2).
8) for your plot, you'll need some new initiative, campaign or scheme: let's say: lollipop ladies...
9) There's a photo-op or a lecture to try and launch this initiative, but something goes wrong. Nicola/Mannion makes a speech about the lollipop scheme, but there's a faux pas: a member of the public asks a question that puts them on the spot: they flounder, ad-lib "awkward" non-sequitars, and try and ingratiate themselves with the questioner. Ollie/Emma pulls a face. Malcolm/Stewart watches it live on TV or hears it over the phone and goes ballistic, repeating whatever non-sequitur Nicola/Mannion has just used: "Postman Pat! Did he [or she] just compare the Party to Postman Pat? WHAT THE FUCK...!" Glen/Phil/Teri looks on nervously as he knocks things off the desk and makes frantic phone calls.
10) Mannion/Nicola arrives back and swears furiously: "Thanks a fucking bunch! I was supposed to be the fucking Lollipop Leader now I'm Postman Prick?" Malcolm/Stewart responds with insults.
(11) Shots of punning or pop-referencing newspaper headlines, photo mock-ups, political cartoons (Nicola hanging from a lollipop like a gallows, Mannion with a lollipop up his backside, Mannion/Nicola as Julius Caesar stabbed in the back with a lollipop, Mannion/Nicola as Postman Pat with someone else significant depicted as his cat Jess) are bemoaned by Stewart/Malcolm and sniggered at by Ollie/Glen/Teri/Emma/Phil.
12) As Mannion/Nicola sets off homewards, Stewart/Malcolm continues to make angry phone calls and Ollie/Glen/Teri/Emma/Phil make ruefully amused comments, the lollipop scheme is abandoned for some fairly ironic reason. All is back as it was. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever will. Credits roll over insults.
13) Any good work of fiction has a political aspect to it. All literature is propaganda, as Orwell said, and the same is true of TV. The Thick of It, however, is only concerned with the politics of the ministry and the party: leave that all that "exploring it through three-dimensional human beings, complex relationships, though-provoking storylines, unbearably moving moments, complex acting, harrowing moments that take the viewer out of their safety zone, putting characters you care about in worrying situations, dramatising important political and social questions through a gripping plot dynamic, finding the admirable traits in loathsome people and vice versa, rich dialogue rather than just a stream of insults, asking what the fuck is wrong with the country" stuff to The Wire, Breaking Bad, Boys From The Blackstuff, Cracker and The Sopranos. That's for people with far too broad a definition of politics.
14) No backstory, no characterisation, no emotion, no non-political humour (unless you count the insults and the pop culture references) no subversion of the format, no suggestion that spin-doctoring and ministerial or party politics are banal. This is not designed as a show that supports an "it's about more than just politicians" reading. It's for people who like talking about politicans, and satire. Hence the straight-to-the-point directing and editing, the abrupt opening and ending, the lack of music or logos, the plain credits. Satire is all it is: what it stands or falls as.
15) that said, don't go overboard on the satire: no anger, keep it non-partisan, keep it safe. This must please satire fans and deliver what is expected: it must not ruffle feathers, cause controversy, upset people.
16) your main messages are:
a) politicians are idiots
b) everything in politics rebounds on you
c) it doesn't make any difference which party
d) swearing is funny
e) all scheme, proposals and initiatives go wrong
f) nothing changes, nothing can be done
17) Trust me, this will work: it's tried and tested, it makes people feel safe, all the more so because it makes them feel the Government is being challenged while they laugh at nob gags and references to Gordon Ramsey.
18) One other thing, the first series, like the current one, starred Peter Capaldi, okay? Look at the DVD cover: Peter Capaldi. I don't see anyone else there, do you? There is no Chris Langham, do you hear me? I don't care if it has gone horribly downhill since he left. Look at the DVD cover, comrade. There was no Langham in the Party.
Friday, 7 September 2012
Why I Loathe Confessional Writing
I have a confession to make: I despise confessional writing. I know it's awful of me as a weak liberal, but I loathe pieces in which the author ruefully acknowledges that that it was awful of them as a weak liberal to do whatever slimy thing they've done. When I was reading Lionel Shriver's piece on how, when a friend of hers got cancer, she abandoned her, but isn't proud of herself, I abandoned reading pieces by Lionel Shriver. Awful of me, I know, but I was too weak. I wasn't brave or unflinching, to give two of the buzz-words that are applied to this kind of writing.
A difference between right-wing hacks and liberal hacks is that while the former do little to persuade even themselves that they're anything other than malodorous, the latter think that saying something abhorrent or doing something abhorrent is redeemed if you pontificate upon how abhorrent it was of you in your piece, and how all of us - not just the author of the piece - are complicit in this abhorrence, for this is an abhorrence symptomatic of our times.
Anne Enright's endlessly detestable piece on the McCann family for The London Review of Books - available here http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/disliking-mccanns.html but currently subscription-only at its home at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/anne-enright/diary (not the first time it's disappeared from there) - is a paradigm. From the words "distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic and disliking the McCanns is an international sport", the piece assumes we are all complicit in the author's obnoxiousness. Praised by Sam Leith ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643503/Anne-Enright-was-spot-on-about-McCann-mania.html ) as "spot-on" and "darkly funny", it gives us the horrible image of Enright using Google Earth to study the hotel in Portugal in order to work out how the kidnapping was feasible while chatting with her husband about whether the McCanns were wifeswappers and staying up late at night to look for further YouTube interviews with the couple.
I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone. In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.’
Actually, she's worse: those people who say such foolish things don't put them on paper for others to see, including the victims. 'Literary' prose stands revealed in this piece as no better than corporate jargon or tabloid-speak: it has its own set of cliches, it panders to the expectations of readers used to this sort of thing, it relates only to itself and not to other human beings or the outside world, it occupies a specific slot within the media, it's deeply callous. The final sentence is "Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns", concluding a pattern that Enright has woven throughout the piece, which is there to tell us this is an essay and not a column, as the smudgy sheen they put on videotape in late-90s-onwards tv programmes is there to tell us this was done on film (perhaps one day the former, too, can be done at the touch of a button). It's those little frowns, those self-deprecations and qualifications, turns at the corners of sentences that are so nauseauting: "I'm not proud of it", "I thought I was angry with them for" "it’s part of our mass paranoia" "I am otherwise inclined". "I have never objected to good-looking women". "Maybe I should believe in myself more" "I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check", one-sentence paragraphs (often the sign of a scoundrel) a whole paragraph consisting of "if." They don't make Enright anything other than a literary rubbernecker.
Forgive me, but let's look at it in more detail:
In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that the cadaver dog had picked up the ‘scent of death’ on her clothes by saying that she had been in contact with six dead patients in the weeks before she came on holiday. My doctor friend doubted this could be true of a part-time GP, unless, we joked, she had ‘done a Shipman’ on them. Then, of course, we had to row back, strenuously, and say that even if something had happened between mother and child, or between father and child, in that apartment, even if the child just fell, then Kate McCann was still the most unfortunate woman you could ever lay eyes on.
[...]
During the white heat of media allegations against Madeleine’s parents, my husband came up the stairs to say that they’d all been wife-swapping – that was why the other diners corroborated the McCanns’ account of the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the distance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said they couldn’t have been wife-swapping, because one of the wives had brought her mother along.
‘Hmmmm,’ he said.
[...]
‘She was only a slip of a thing,’ I said.
I did not say that the body might have been made more pliable by decomposition. And I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check (get in there now, sweetheart, and curl up into a ball).
[...]
Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.
[...]
It is not that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass.
[...]
Most of the animosity against the McCanns centres on the figure of Madeleine’s beautiful mother. I am otherwise inclined. I find Gerry McCann’s need to ‘influence the investigation’ more provoking than her flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that flecks her public appearances. I have never objected to good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue of narcissism in general; her daughter’s strong relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and pain.
We can see all the prejudices of a tabloid mind here: prurient speculations about the McCanns' sex lives; wondering whether they killed their child; the obscenely irrelevent matter of Kate McCann's good looks; wondering why they don't accept their daughter is probably dead; unverified sources; pawing at whatever scraps of juicy new internet gossip you can get; hating someone you've never met because of media coverage, all of them with that recurring note, that constant emphasis, that constant damned assumption that this is the kind of thing we all do. It "makes harridans of us all." Yes, Enright knows her dislike of the McCanns is preposterous, and that expecting them to go away and grieve is nonsensical as well as callous, and she knows you know, but she's only being honest. Yes it's bad to do things like this, but it's the way of the world, our sin not mine. Only that reassuring preciousness in the language - the "'Hmmmm,' he said" getting a paragraph to itself - distinguishes it as "literary", a step up from Jon Gaunt, and that endless veering from the McCanns to the more important matter of the inside of Anne Enright's head ("I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an unhealthy trust of strangers.") Good to know that Enright has no problem with attractive women, though. I have one with ugly prose.
Following 9/11, the literary editor Robert McCrum foolishly argued - in a piece available here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/september11.society - that:
swamped as we've been with a tidal wave of quite unbear able reality, it's the writers of fiction, contemporary masters such as Ian McEwan in Britain and Paul Auster in the US, who have come up with the words of comfort and clarity we crave in the midst of shock and desolation. People sometimes dismiss fiction as mere entertainment, but at times like this there's no question that novelists at their best have a privileged access to truths about the human condition denied to others. Partly, this is because they have a detachment that reporters, caught up in the maelstrom of events, cannot equal. Journalism is history's first draft, and the journalism of novelists, while not always to everyone's taste, can supply the insights that people need at a time like this.
In Enright's "liking the McCanns" prose we can see the worst effects of that very approach to writing. The belief that you can take a real-life situation and render it "literary" results in sentences about other people's suffering which are more interested in how that sentence should be structured. This is why George Orwell argued that good prose should be like a windowpane. Compare the piece with Christopher Hitchens's report on the victims of Agent Orange, or how Orwell himself writes on those living in poverty, and the latter's account of a hanging. Both are great stylists, but because they care more about their subjects than their literary standing, they leave you caring about the victims and wondering what can done about the situation, rather than nodding at the inevitability of our callousness and insularity, grateful it at least allowed a novelist to alleviate the horror by churning out exactly what literary periodical subscribers expect from literary prose. Martin Amis's non-fiction has moved from one pole to the other. The first three collections of essays by Amis are the work of an alert, interested, empathetic journalist (take a look at his fine, moving piece on the AIDS crisis in The Moronic Inferno). The Amis behind Experience, Koba the Dread and The Second Plane, who writes about others' suffering but cares about nothing other than his own phrasing ("Fred West will only get one sentence from me [...] Here is that sentence") is much less worth having.
Literary hackery, like tabloid hackery, is a factory. The difference is that it's where the alternatives to the mass-produced are mass-produced; where the alternatives to the churned-out are churned out. Novelists are much better at writing novels than anyone else, but the idea that we understand events like 9/11 or Madeline McCann's abduction all the better once we've read Martin Amis describing his "species grief" at the "worldflash" of a terrible future, his replacement of the word terrorism with horrorism and how Anne Enright felt when she woke up trivialises the those events as surely as it overrates those authors (and sadly, Amis's outburst about strip-searching Muslims and not letting them travel until they "get their house in order", his reliance on Neocon sources like Mark Steyn and Amis and Ian McEwan's awesomely daft attempts at political symbolism in their respective novels Yellow Dog and Saturday are just three things out that didn't bear out McCrum's prophecy of an invigorating novelistic response to 9/11).
Confessional writing doesn't wait until violence or tragedy takes place, though. Zadie Smith's inexplicable piece for The New Yorker on the way she treated a poverty-stricken friend she lent money to -
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_smith - has already been roasted by Edward Champion here
( http://www.edrants.com/zadie-smith-the-literary-material-girl/ ) and little more can be said, except that once again Smith thinks that pontificating on bad behaviour stops the reader from gagging on that bad behaviour. Furthermore, she is only aware of half of what she actually did wrong. She seems to think her sins are impatience for the paying of the debt, and thoughtlessness in not realising her friend had no internet connection with which to contact her. She seems unaware of the question of why she needed a loan paid back in the first place if it was, in her words, "no skin off my nose", or whether the friend deserved to have her problems paraded in The New Yorker in this way (as Champion points out, withholding your friend's name isn't sufficient if you're famous: anyone who knew them both could identify her).
Over in Britain, the broadsheet reaction to the killing spree and death of Raoul Moat brought to the mind the storm over James Bulger's murder. In the latter, the pontifications of more liberal, up-market hacks determined to make a career for themselves was almost as vile as that of the tabloids. The career of Blake Morrison owes a lot to it as does that of Andrew O'Hagen. Regarding the latter, have a look at this narcissistic essay for The London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n05/andrew-ohagan/diary - the first piece of writing he ever had published - and the obscene mixture of prurience and facetiousness in the subsequent letters exchange, in which a bunch of people with the time to write long letters to The London Review of Books expand a discussion of infanticide to jokey criticisms of each others' letters (those endless quips about "eating my hat") and the merits of Richmal Crompton's William books. At least they're keeping themselves amused, and O'Hagen's got a career out of it.
Morrison used the same murder (in his book As If, as well as pieces for The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/feb/06/bulger.ukcrime) whenever the case resurfaces) to ruminate on everything from the nature of evil itself to his own shortcomings as a parent and as a heterosexual man. His pieces combine deeply distressing details from the murder itself - although they don't seem to distress Morrison as much as they distress me: at one point he mentions a particularly horrific detail and adds that it was withheld at the trial to spare James Bulger's family suffering, but doesn't bother to tell us why he felt otherwise, just as Enright is untroubled by describing Madeline McCann as "probably dead" - with flippant gags like this: "As Larkin might have put it, parental anxiety began in 1993 [the year of the murder], between the Children's Act and Eminem's first CD."
Reading the moment in As If where Morrison, narrating the trial in the present tense, notices both Jon Venables and Robert Thompson are putting on weight; remembers that he and his sister were fat at their age; and reminisces about divebombing in the swimming pool in Majorca in front of derisive holiday-makers, it's not surprising that a few years later we'd reach a stage where Martin Amis, in a non-fiction book on the Stalinist Purges, would compare the screams of his baby daughter to the screams from the Gulag. By the time we reach the chapter describing Morrison's own baby daughter, we're treated to the saccharine prose of Tony Parsons's smarter brother:
The whorled, Danish Pastry of an ear, the stretched skin above the lobe so paper-thin the sun shines through
the silver seal of a milk-blister on an upper lip
A gleaming, gappy grin, a last little spit out of pink
where she lies, a dairy squiggle, on the floor
there she lies, a fizz of cream on the floor.
Prose like this supports McCrum's claim that creative writers address the troubles of the world in a way the rest of us can't: specifically, they cutesefy a troubling issue and reduce it to an opportunity for putting hyper-sugary, comfortingly literary - rather than startling, convincing or moving - combinations of words together and exploring the author's past. I certainly couldn't write like that. Morrison is right to be horrified at the words of John Major at the time of the killing - "we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less" - but narcissists understand nothing either, not even themselves.
Morrison was quick to let us know what he thought of the Virginia Tech massacre, too - this piece appeared in The Guardian just three days later http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/apr/19/internationaleducationnews.highereducation
opening with this absurdly blinkered and impertinent paragraph:
I can't have been the only writer dismayed to learn that Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, was a literature student. Few people today believe the idea, passed down from Matthew Arnold through TS Eliot and FR Leavis, that the study of books can civilise and humanise us. But it is alarming to think that majoring in English might have contributed to Cho's problems or even inspired him to become a mass murderer.
The sheer insularity of literary hackery can be suffocating sometimes. As if the subject Seung-Hui was studying was of any fucking relevance. The delusion that literature ought to make people less likely to shoot one another has been around since Joseph Brodsky's claim that it is more problematic for someone who has read Dickens to shoot people than for someone who has not (a recurring bugbear mentioned neither for the first nor for the last time on this blog); here Morrison repeats that thoughtless insult to non-novel-readers and then inverts it. The "only writer" to think this way? We can only hope.
During the Raoul Moat coverage, one non-tabloid journalist ruefully confessed to finding herself rooting for Moat, wanting him to escape because she found it hard not to think of him as the underdog. When I say I empathised more with the policeman he shot and blinded, the girl he wounded and the family of the man he shot dead, it might seem pious, but let me stress I don't regard this - and the fact that I've never "disliked" the McCanns - as evidence of a high character: I regard them as the norm. Hacks like these rely on assumptions: on the belief that we all inevitably fall prey to the worst aspects of modern culture, that we're all addicted, that we're all obsessed, that we're all complicit. Scummy thoughts and ideas are allowed to become norms rather than embarrassments.
The late Gordon Burn's piece on Jade Goody,
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordon-burn?cat=books&type=article
similarly, was barely preferable to OK magazine's tribute, which put "In Loving Memory 1981-2009" on its front cover before she had actually died. Burn's piece isn't interested in pricking the balloon; it attributes the manipulation of Goody to a global cultural state of affairs rather than an unpleasant tv programme. If we took the latter view, we could think of practical ways to prevent demonic circuses like the one that sprang around Goody happening again (not letting Peter Bazalgette become head of the UK Arts Council, not commissioning anything like Big Brother again, boycotting tabloids, working out how to promote such a boycott), but the view Burn takes is that this what life is like the 21st Century, predicted by Roth, Bellow, Foster Wallace and Mailer, and that we are all complicit in making and keeping it that way. It's a piece which expresses no interest in changing anything.
It's time to to start saying No: Every other person doesn't feel this way, it is your fault rather than the cultural climate, and your honesty doesn't redeem it. Why not start checking your behaviour at the time rather than publishing an essay on it a few days later? Ask yourself why you slow down for car crashes.
A difference between right-wing hacks and liberal hacks is that while the former do little to persuade even themselves that they're anything other than malodorous, the latter think that saying something abhorrent or doing something abhorrent is redeemed if you pontificate upon how abhorrent it was of you in your piece, and how all of us - not just the author of the piece - are complicit in this abhorrence, for this is an abhorrence symptomatic of our times.
Anne Enright's endlessly detestable piece on the McCann family for The London Review of Books - available here http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/disliking-mccanns.html but currently subscription-only at its home at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/anne-enright/diary (not the first time it's disappeared from there) - is a paradigm. From the words "distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic and disliking the McCanns is an international sport", the piece assumes we are all complicit in the author's obnoxiousness. Praised by Sam Leith ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643503/Anne-Enright-was-spot-on-about-McCann-mania.html ) as "spot-on" and "darkly funny", it gives us the horrible image of Enright using Google Earth to study the hotel in Portugal in order to work out how the kidnapping was feasible while chatting with her husband about whether the McCanns were wifeswappers and staying up late at night to look for further YouTube interviews with the couple.
I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone. In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.’
Actually, she's worse: those people who say such foolish things don't put them on paper for others to see, including the victims. 'Literary' prose stands revealed in this piece as no better than corporate jargon or tabloid-speak: it has its own set of cliches, it panders to the expectations of readers used to this sort of thing, it relates only to itself and not to other human beings or the outside world, it occupies a specific slot within the media, it's deeply callous. The final sentence is "Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns", concluding a pattern that Enright has woven throughout the piece, which is there to tell us this is an essay and not a column, as the smudgy sheen they put on videotape in late-90s-onwards tv programmes is there to tell us this was done on film (perhaps one day the former, too, can be done at the touch of a button). It's those little frowns, those self-deprecations and qualifications, turns at the corners of sentences that are so nauseauting: "I'm not proud of it", "I thought I was angry with them for" "it’s part of our mass paranoia" "I am otherwise inclined". "I have never objected to good-looking women". "Maybe I should believe in myself more" "I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check", one-sentence paragraphs (often the sign of a scoundrel) a whole paragraph consisting of "if." They don't make Enright anything other than a literary rubbernecker.
Forgive me, but let's look at it in more detail:
In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that the cadaver dog had picked up the ‘scent of death’ on her clothes by saying that she had been in contact with six dead patients in the weeks before she came on holiday. My doctor friend doubted this could be true of a part-time GP, unless, we joked, she had ‘done a Shipman’ on them. Then, of course, we had to row back, strenuously, and say that even if something had happened between mother and child, or between father and child, in that apartment, even if the child just fell, then Kate McCann was still the most unfortunate woman you could ever lay eyes on.
[...]
During the white heat of media allegations against Madeleine’s parents, my husband came up the stairs to say that they’d all been wife-swapping – that was why the other diners corroborated the McCanns’ account of the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the distance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said they couldn’t have been wife-swapping, because one of the wives had brought her mother along.
‘Hmmmm,’ he said.
[...]
‘She was only a slip of a thing,’ I said.
I did not say that the body might have been made more pliable by decomposition. And I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check (get in there now, sweetheart, and curl up into a ball).
[...]
Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.
[...]
It is not that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass.
[...]
Most of the animosity against the McCanns centres on the figure of Madeleine’s beautiful mother. I am otherwise inclined. I find Gerry McCann’s need to ‘influence the investigation’ more provoking than her flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that flecks her public appearances. I have never objected to good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue of narcissism in general; her daughter’s strong relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and pain.
We can see all the prejudices of a tabloid mind here: prurient speculations about the McCanns' sex lives; wondering whether they killed their child; the obscenely irrelevent matter of Kate McCann's good looks; wondering why they don't accept their daughter is probably dead; unverified sources; pawing at whatever scraps of juicy new internet gossip you can get; hating someone you've never met because of media coverage, all of them with that recurring note, that constant emphasis, that constant damned assumption that this is the kind of thing we all do. It "makes harridans of us all." Yes, Enright knows her dislike of the McCanns is preposterous, and that expecting them to go away and grieve is nonsensical as well as callous, and she knows you know, but she's only being honest. Yes it's bad to do things like this, but it's the way of the world, our sin not mine. Only that reassuring preciousness in the language - the "'Hmmmm,' he said" getting a paragraph to itself - distinguishes it as "literary", a step up from Jon Gaunt, and that endless veering from the McCanns to the more important matter of the inside of Anne Enright's head ("I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an unhealthy trust of strangers.") Good to know that Enright has no problem with attractive women, though. I have one with ugly prose.
Following 9/11, the literary editor Robert McCrum foolishly argued - in a piece available here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/september11.society - that:
swamped as we've been with a tidal wave of quite unbear able reality, it's the writers of fiction, contemporary masters such as Ian McEwan in Britain and Paul Auster in the US, who have come up with the words of comfort and clarity we crave in the midst of shock and desolation. People sometimes dismiss fiction as mere entertainment, but at times like this there's no question that novelists at their best have a privileged access to truths about the human condition denied to others. Partly, this is because they have a detachment that reporters, caught up in the maelstrom of events, cannot equal. Journalism is history's first draft, and the journalism of novelists, while not always to everyone's taste, can supply the insights that people need at a time like this.
In Enright's "liking the McCanns" prose we can see the worst effects of that very approach to writing. The belief that you can take a real-life situation and render it "literary" results in sentences about other people's suffering which are more interested in how that sentence should be structured. This is why George Orwell argued that good prose should be like a windowpane. Compare the piece with Christopher Hitchens's report on the victims of Agent Orange, or how Orwell himself writes on those living in poverty, and the latter's account of a hanging. Both are great stylists, but because they care more about their subjects than their literary standing, they leave you caring about the victims and wondering what can done about the situation, rather than nodding at the inevitability of our callousness and insularity, grateful it at least allowed a novelist to alleviate the horror by churning out exactly what literary periodical subscribers expect from literary prose. Martin Amis's non-fiction has moved from one pole to the other. The first three collections of essays by Amis are the work of an alert, interested, empathetic journalist (take a look at his fine, moving piece on the AIDS crisis in The Moronic Inferno). The Amis behind Experience, Koba the Dread and The Second Plane, who writes about others' suffering but cares about nothing other than his own phrasing ("Fred West will only get one sentence from me [...] Here is that sentence") is much less worth having.
Literary hackery, like tabloid hackery, is a factory. The difference is that it's where the alternatives to the mass-produced are mass-produced; where the alternatives to the churned-out are churned out. Novelists are much better at writing novels than anyone else, but the idea that we understand events like 9/11 or Madeline McCann's abduction all the better once we've read Martin Amis describing his "species grief" at the "worldflash" of a terrible future, his replacement of the word terrorism with horrorism and how Anne Enright felt when she woke up trivialises the those events as surely as it overrates those authors (and sadly, Amis's outburst about strip-searching Muslims and not letting them travel until they "get their house in order", his reliance on Neocon sources like Mark Steyn and Amis and Ian McEwan's awesomely daft attempts at political symbolism in their respective novels Yellow Dog and Saturday are just three things out that didn't bear out McCrum's prophecy of an invigorating novelistic response to 9/11).
Confessional writing doesn't wait until violence or tragedy takes place, though. Zadie Smith's inexplicable piece for The New Yorker on the way she treated a poverty-stricken friend she lent money to -
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_smith - has already been roasted by Edward Champion here
( http://www.edrants.com/zadie-smith-the-literary-material-girl/ ) and little more can be said, except that once again Smith thinks that pontificating on bad behaviour stops the reader from gagging on that bad behaviour. Furthermore, she is only aware of half of what she actually did wrong. She seems to think her sins are impatience for the paying of the debt, and thoughtlessness in not realising her friend had no internet connection with which to contact her. She seems unaware of the question of why she needed a loan paid back in the first place if it was, in her words, "no skin off my nose", or whether the friend deserved to have her problems paraded in The New Yorker in this way (as Champion points out, withholding your friend's name isn't sufficient if you're famous: anyone who knew them both could identify her).
Over in Britain, the broadsheet reaction to the killing spree and death of Raoul Moat brought to the mind the storm over James Bulger's murder. In the latter, the pontifications of more liberal, up-market hacks determined to make a career for themselves was almost as vile as that of the tabloids. The career of Blake Morrison owes a lot to it as does that of Andrew O'Hagen. Regarding the latter, have a look at this narcissistic essay for The London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n05/andrew-ohagan/diary - the first piece of writing he ever had published - and the obscene mixture of prurience and facetiousness in the subsequent letters exchange, in which a bunch of people with the time to write long letters to The London Review of Books expand a discussion of infanticide to jokey criticisms of each others' letters (those endless quips about "eating my hat") and the merits of Richmal Crompton's William books. At least they're keeping themselves amused, and O'Hagen's got a career out of it.
Morrison used the same murder (in his book As If, as well as pieces for The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/feb/06/bulger.ukcrime) whenever the case resurfaces) to ruminate on everything from the nature of evil itself to his own shortcomings as a parent and as a heterosexual man. His pieces combine deeply distressing details from the murder itself - although they don't seem to distress Morrison as much as they distress me: at one point he mentions a particularly horrific detail and adds that it was withheld at the trial to spare James Bulger's family suffering, but doesn't bother to tell us why he felt otherwise, just as Enright is untroubled by describing Madeline McCann as "probably dead" - with flippant gags like this: "As Larkin might have put it, parental anxiety began in 1993 [the year of the murder], between the Children's Act and Eminem's first CD."
Reading the moment in As If where Morrison, narrating the trial in the present tense, notices both Jon Venables and Robert Thompson are putting on weight; remembers that he and his sister were fat at their age; and reminisces about divebombing in the swimming pool in Majorca in front of derisive holiday-makers, it's not surprising that a few years later we'd reach a stage where Martin Amis, in a non-fiction book on the Stalinist Purges, would compare the screams of his baby daughter to the screams from the Gulag. By the time we reach the chapter describing Morrison's own baby daughter, we're treated to the saccharine prose of Tony Parsons's smarter brother:
The whorled, Danish Pastry of an ear, the stretched skin above the lobe so paper-thin the sun shines through
the silver seal of a milk-blister on an upper lip
A gleaming, gappy grin, a last little spit out of pink
where she lies, a dairy squiggle, on the floor
there she lies, a fizz of cream on the floor.
Prose like this supports McCrum's claim that creative writers address the troubles of the world in a way the rest of us can't: specifically, they cutesefy a troubling issue and reduce it to an opportunity for putting hyper-sugary, comfortingly literary - rather than startling, convincing or moving - combinations of words together and exploring the author's past. I certainly couldn't write like that. Morrison is right to be horrified at the words of John Major at the time of the killing - "we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less" - but narcissists understand nothing either, not even themselves.
Morrison was quick to let us know what he thought of the Virginia Tech massacre, too - this piece appeared in The Guardian just three days later http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/apr/19/internationaleducationnews.highereducation
opening with this absurdly blinkered and impertinent paragraph:
I can't have been the only writer dismayed to learn that Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, was a literature student. Few people today believe the idea, passed down from Matthew Arnold through TS Eliot and FR Leavis, that the study of books can civilise and humanise us. But it is alarming to think that majoring in English might have contributed to Cho's problems or even inspired him to become a mass murderer.
The sheer insularity of literary hackery can be suffocating sometimes. As if the subject Seung-Hui was studying was of any fucking relevance. The delusion that literature ought to make people less likely to shoot one another has been around since Joseph Brodsky's claim that it is more problematic for someone who has read Dickens to shoot people than for someone who has not (a recurring bugbear mentioned neither for the first nor for the last time on this blog); here Morrison repeats that thoughtless insult to non-novel-readers and then inverts it. The "only writer" to think this way? We can only hope.
During the Raoul Moat coverage, one non-tabloid journalist ruefully confessed to finding herself rooting for Moat, wanting him to escape because she found it hard not to think of him as the underdog. When I say I empathised more with the policeman he shot and blinded, the girl he wounded and the family of the man he shot dead, it might seem pious, but let me stress I don't regard this - and the fact that I've never "disliked" the McCanns - as evidence of a high character: I regard them as the norm. Hacks like these rely on assumptions: on the belief that we all inevitably fall prey to the worst aspects of modern culture, that we're all addicted, that we're all obsessed, that we're all complicit. Scummy thoughts and ideas are allowed to become norms rather than embarrassments.
The late Gordon Burn's piece on Jade Goody,
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordon-burn?cat=books&type=article
similarly, was barely preferable to OK magazine's tribute, which put "In Loving Memory 1981-2009" on its front cover before she had actually died. Burn's piece isn't interested in pricking the balloon; it attributes the manipulation of Goody to a global cultural state of affairs rather than an unpleasant tv programme. If we took the latter view, we could think of practical ways to prevent demonic circuses like the one that sprang around Goody happening again (not letting Peter Bazalgette become head of the UK Arts Council, not commissioning anything like Big Brother again, boycotting tabloids, working out how to promote such a boycott), but the view Burn takes is that this what life is like the 21st Century, predicted by Roth, Bellow, Foster Wallace and Mailer, and that we are all complicit in making and keeping it that way. It's a piece which expresses no interest in changing anything.
It's time to to start saying No: Every other person doesn't feel this way, it is your fault rather than the cultural climate, and your honesty doesn't redeem it. Why not start checking your behaviour at the time rather than publishing an essay on it a few days later? Ask yourself why you slow down for car crashes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)