On the Morality of Authors

 There was something people used to say at the Dr Johnson House that I found myself saying sometimes, that we were lucky as a museum to not have to apologise for Samuel Johnson. This phrase usually came up when talking about the relationship of Samuel Johnson and Francis Barber, unlike many museums we didn’t have to apologise for being involved with the slave trade, on the contrary, Johnson was one of the earlier protestors against and left much of his money to someone born a slave.

It’s not the whole story though. The relationship between Johnson and Barber wasn’t always the smoothest, he was overbearing in general, especially to those he cared for and he steered Barber into life paths against his will. What’s more, the house itself is literally built with a consequence of slavery. The floorboards are American red woods which were used as ship’s lumber to weigh it down on the return leg of the triangular trade, probably stacked in the same hold that held the slaves.

Another way we felt we were lucky to have Johnson was his attitude to women’s education. It’s an  odd thing, one of his most famous quotes is denigrating a woman preacher, but many of his other actions show a keen support for intelligent women. He helped market women’s writing, regarded Elizabeth Carter as something of a role model, came up with a plan of education for Hester Thrale’s daughter, Queeney. Even his jabs at Scotland fall more into the category of jokey banter than actual invective.

But why do we need our writers and historical figures to be good?

Writers are a famously anti-social bunch of people and many lived incredibly messy lives and held incredibly messy views. Goldsmith was an early abolitionist who wrote under the patronage of the very slave-positive Lord Mayor of Bristol. Smart’s Jubilate Agno is full of misogyny (much of which is being worked through as the text progresses.) Some of the best writers, like the Scriblerans, are essentially writing on ‘the wrong side of history’, upholding the traditional practices of patronage over commercial literature. Essentially, they gate-keep public expression as something for the wealthy and educated.

Boswell does some terrible things, dressing up as a commoner so he can rape a prostitute in front of an audience on Westminster Bridge. Casanova is a seducer, conman and attempted murderer, Smollett used the funds of his wife’s sugar plantation to set himself up a gentleman, Fielding may have groomed his housekeeper, Thomas Day specifically educated a young girl to become the perfect wife… the list goes on.

Just before I fell into my eighteenth century hole, I very nearly fell into a seventeenth century one (a time period I still find very interesting). This was because of another Samuel, Samuel Pepys. I have, and have read, the complete unabridged diary which I read with great pleasure and occasional alarm. He was so open to life, to new ideas and experiences - and he was a complete shit. A creepy, pervy little man who used his position of power to grope as many poor women as possible. The more I’ve become aware of this side of him, the harder he is to read.

Yet, how terrible many of these people are (or more accurately, how terrible some aspects of them are) I still read them. Casanova is a pretty awful person but he is a very entertaining one. In general, I’d prefer to read something about, or by, someone deeply flawed and interesting than someone boring. Not that immorality makes someone interesting, a person who will predictably do the most selfish thing is deeply boring also. 

An aspect of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that taught me a lesson for writing and life is the way his character’s greatest flaws have the same source as their greatest virtues. Anna’s strong emotional life powers her best and worst moments, as does Karenin’s logical detachment. Similarly, both Pepys and Casanova are powered by their hunger for experience - it leads them to create joyful, expansive visions of life at the same time it leads them to use other people (particularly women) as means to experience new things. (Incidentally, I’m with Kant, people should always be ends in themselves and never means).

One of my favourite books is Arieh Sachs’s Passionate Intelligence. It argues that one of the key themes of Johnson’s writing, and a key drive in his life was the urge to blend the power of imagination (which Johnson saw as inherently selfish) with the steering power of reason (which is universal but a little inert). This blend Sachs calls ‘Passionate Intelligence’. Like most of Johnson’s ideas, it’s not a new one. Plato talked about the driver steering the white and black horses on the same path - the idea of reason being the reins for passion is a common one.  Of course, he failed to enact this ideal but he tried, and I think that’s why Dr Johnson’s house is lucky to have him. 

Ultimately, worrying about the morality of other people, especially long-dead people is a fruitless endeavour. The only morality we have control over is our own. We need to be aware of who influences us and how. we also need to be open about the flaws of the people we study just as we need to be aware of our own. I’d like the joy and openness of Pepys, the hope of Smart, an awareness of my own absurdity and contradiction like Goldsmith and the passionate intelligence of Johnson - but I have to accept that I am me, with all the benefits and constraints that entails. 

Trying out Youtube's 'Inspiration' feature.

 I've had a little poke about on AI now and again. I know it's awful but I can't help being nosy. This time I discovered a feature on Youtube that gives you ideas for a video, structures it and provides thumbnails. I gave it a little go.

Review: The Ladies by Doris Grumbach

 The Ladies of Llangollen were a pair of Irish heiresses, with a twenty year age-gap, who set up house together in a Welsh valley. There, they lived a quiet and domestic life, slowly improving their home and gardens, keeping to themselves, whilst wearing a masculine coded uniform of riding habits, white powdered hair and top hats. They became famous, ending up having lots of famous visitors who often left little gifts. 

The Ladies is a novel that retells these events and, while it teases out some of the tensions within The Ladies’ lives, it never fully goes beyond being a retelling to a fully alive, flesh-and-blood novel.  Events are rejigged, the point of view does delves into Eleanor and Sarah’s heads, but it never seems to grow from someone telling the reader their version of the events into a shaped and compelling work of literature. Their story is fascinating, and that made the book an enjoyable read, but it was (presumably) more accurately, and more engagingly told in Elizabeth Maven’s The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship.

Part of my ambivalence about the book is the use of tense. It swaps between past and present tense, seemingly at random. There are no chapters in the book but it’s split into four sections, yet the tense isn’t consistent within these sections. Going back to the book and skipping through to when the tense changes, I think any part about the two Ladies on their own or together are in present tense, and the parts when they are with someone else are in the past. If this is true, I think the idea is that when they are together, things are more intense and immediate but washed out when their essential togetherness is watered down by the presence of someone else. If so, it’s an interesting idea, but it comes across as muddled.

The Ladies have represented a lot to people. To the age they lived in, they were either ‘damned sapphists’, as Hester Thrale called them, or a symbol of a pure romantic friendship to be celebrated. Certainly, they saw themselves in a tradition of Rousseau and sought to bring a cosy, homely quality to their lives, especially expressed by their garden. To many queer people today they represent an ideal, a happy and fulfilled domestic life. Anne Lister even went to meet them to see how a same sex ‘marriage’ could work. The Ladies themselves were indignant about any sexual aspersions being cast on them, but Grumbach’s novel centres their sexual life as the anchor of the relationship, with their shared bed being a separate and better world. (That said, it’s never an explicit book).

The most interesting thing the book does, is poke some criticisms into the life the Ladies built together. Their cosy life of reading, sewing and walking in the gardens is one that has been celebrated as ideal. Personally, it seems like a very heaven to me. However, the book pulls at a divide between the home they built in Wales and a sense of exile from their families in Ireland. There’s a sense that the very routine and domestic life they lived also served as something of a prison.

The most novelistic parts of the book happen at the beginning, where the Ladies formed their relationship, prepared an escape, made it and then were captured before making an arrangement to be allowed to go off together. The characterisation of Eleanor’s parents and Sarah’s gropey guardian are often stronger than the characterisation of the Ladies themselves. It’s quite a gripping beginning.

The flattest section is at the end, entitled ‘visitors’, which is largely a description of all the people that visited their houses and the Ladies’ slow decline. The book starts to come to a conclusion about their relationship at this part, and it’s an interesting an nuanced one. Their relationship was intense and fulfilling but in being so central to them it trapped them together and denied them access to the rest of the world. It seems their relationship was enough for them, which is brilliant, but if it hadn’t been, it would have been a slow suffocation.

Personally, this book has reenforced me an important lesson as I am writing a book featuring real historical people. That the book needs to be a novel as well as a retelling.

Overconsumption and my Book Habit

 I'm currently unpacking and organising my books in order to create my dream house-library, so I've turned it into a little video about my book consumption habits.

Review: Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

 

Having read The Interesting Adventures of Olaudah Equiano and A Portable Paradise, I seemed to have something of a slavery theme in my reading (as unintentional as it was) so I decided to continue it with Blood and Sugar, a murder mystery set around the slave traders of Deptford.

At first, I found the book a little pulpy, the sort of book where shadows are described as passing over someone’s soul. This feeling was further increased when the main character walked into a room, the narrator described a several paragraph itinerary of what was in it than told the reader, “I noted all these facts peripherally”. As the book went on, the pulpy elements seemed less glaring as I got into the voice of the book, then they became a feature I enjoyed about it.

Captain Harry Corsham is essentially a noir-ish gumshoe detective and this is a noir-ish gumshoe book, complete with a fun, slightly cheesy, first-person voice. It’s paced brilliantly, with a shocking act or piece of information coming along regularly and a small cliffhanger at the end of all of the short chapters. I can see why C.J Tudor said she read it in a day.

There’s a shocking murder at the beginning, a body is found which has been branded, tortured with thumbscrews, whipped and then had their throat slit. The visceral nature of the murder grabs the attention, like the more twisted murders in Seven or that Messiah series. However, these are all revealed to be typical slave punishments and the sadistic aspects of the killing are everyday actions to the slavers, and a perpetual fear for the slaves. 

The casualness of cruelty that the slavers adopt and the impact of that cruelty on their own souls is one of the themes of the book. Corsham wanders about Deptford and finds an ironmonger shop which sells thumbscrews, scold’s bridles and chains “every size, from four years old”. People off-handedly talk about how they had to crucify someone to pacify others, and the central mystery which surrounds a Zong-like ship.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the depiction of Deptford, as somewhere that is specifically distinct from London. They have their own accents, their own rules and their own systems of control. The ownership of slaves within England itself was a very muddy one, and the people of Deptford own outright slaves where that wouldn’t be possible within London itself.

There’s also a lot about the precariousness of being a freed slave. Equiano found himself constantly cheated and was several times almost kidnapped back into slavery, but this was always when he was in the West Indies. It could be that he was writing for a London audience that meant he didn’t talk about similar problems in England itself, but the freed slaves in this novel are almost as imprisoned as the slaves themselves. Two work as painters and abolitionists but are easy prey for anyone who wishes to attack them, another runs a criminal gang which protects freed slaves, and another works for a slave-trader he despises. 

There’s also a lot about how slavery was considered one of the nation’s backbones and that the urge to protect the institution went into the upper classes and the government. Captain Corsham has to do a lot of sneaking around his ‘own people’ so he won’t be caught undermining their interests.

While this book does paint a graphic picture of slavery, the harm it did to all participants of it and how entrenched it was within the country, it still manages to be a decent noir-ish thriller, keeping the pace up throughout. I found the solution of the murderer to be quite dissatisfying, and I can see why the killer was who they were from a story structure sense, I felt it detracted from the book in a thematic one.

I’m not sure I’ll read Daughters of the Night, which appears to be Corsham’s wife delving into the underbelly of prostitution to solve her own murder, but only because I feel like it’d be more of the same. I can’t decide whether using the backdrop of slavery for a mystery novel feels appropriate or not, the reality of the slave trade seems like one of those dark events, like the holocaust, that doesn’t easily fit with a very constructed genre piece. The carefully constructed, and pulpy elements of the book did sometimes clash with the genuine horror of history.

 

Review: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano

After many years of almost reading it, I finally sat down with The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, expecting a book that was didactic and rather grim but finding a rather rollicking tale of adventures on the high-seas instead. 

One of the first things I found out from the introduction, is that the name Olaudah Equiano was a name only used in this text and that he went under the name Gustavus Vassa in all his daily interactions and other publications. It seems he used the name for this account, along with his slave name of Gustavus Vassa, as a way of claiming the dual identity as an African man, a captured slave - and then his third identity as a freeman. There are claims that he wasn’t born in Africa at all, but America, and the whole first section of the text is either completely made up or someone else’s history retold. I’m inclined to believe he was originally an African, as those early sections do have the hazy quality of memory and his point of view remains consistent with someone brought out of childhood freedom and into an adulthood of slavery.

It’s interesting how he paints his African life, as a member of the Igbo and the son of an important man.He portrays life in Africa as simple, honest and good. There is mention of famine, but largely the land provides well, the villages and families all work together and work hard, there isn’t any idleness nor unwarranted luxuries  and there isn’t any weird sexual stuff. He links the circumcision and ritual cleansing of the village to the practice of Jews. It’s clear that he’s trying to replace the image white readers will have of Africa as a place of superstition and unreason with something they could support and feel sympathy when it is torn apart.

The only negative thing in Vassa’s life are the gangs of slavers. These are so frequent, that children going out playing together need bodyguards to look out for them. However, this system can’t work every time and Vassa and his sister are captured. It’s heartbreaking when he informs the reader that a certain moment is the last time he saw his sister, and his speculation about the form of life she may have led since.

He’s captured by black slavers and become a slave to black families. He’s a slave, but it’s still among cultures he knows and languages he understands. He still feels part of the family, not property, even in his enslaved state. Yet, he gets moved further and further from home, then to black families not part of his language group and finally into the hands of white traders. He finds these people horrifying, not only the genuine horrors he experiences from them, but the utter culture shock they present to him. 

The passage is an awful thing, with the cramped, sick and dying bodies of people around him. Slaves being taken on deck for air try to jump off the ship to their deaths, but a netted cage is put around it to catch them, so they are punished and stuffed back in the hold. It’s a nightmarish scenario and hard to imagine. There’s also the fact that the position of slave seems different to how it’s been presented before. In the black households, slaves were compelled to work for their masters, but were still people, now he is de-personed altogether. This starts a consistent theme that although the whites are given the teachings of Jesus, and ought to be the most humane, they are frequently less humane than infidels and barbarians. 

After a brief time in the West Indies, where he is bought and sees a slave-woman in a scold’s bridle, he is given to a naval Lieutenant and set to follow him onto Royal Navy ships. At this point the book becomes a set of naval tales, featuring battles and storms and all other common tropes of the sea narrative. Vassa’s place as a slave is less noticeable on a ship as all the sailors have to haul and sweat to keep the ship together. It’s only at the end of this time, when he expects his master to free him and give him his pay and prize money that his status as a slave becomes relevant again. It’s like a shower of cold water as the master, who seems to have been a pretty decent person up till now, says that all Vassa’s wages and prize money go to him as the master and, what’s more, he’s going to sell him into the West Indies.

Of all the many countries Vassa visits through his life, there is no place worse than the West Indies (withe the possible exception of Georgia in the US). He almost sees the place as a moral disease and, the closer a person gets to it, the worse their morals become. He’s lucky in that he’s sold to a ‘kind’ master (a Quaker of all things) who sets him as a clerk, then hires his services out as a first mate on a ship. Vassa uses these trips to run little side-hustles, in which he builds the wealth he needs to buy his own freedom. This was the most frustrating part of the book. Not only did the ships suffer frequent wreckings - there’s one whole set-piece where he’s on four ships wrecked in a row, including the ship sent to pick up those wrecked. But as a slave (and even later as a freed slave, but a black person) he has no legal redress by law. This means that people who don’t want to pay him can simply not. They can even whip him, chain him and abuse him for the temerity of asking them to pay and agreed price.

Eventually, after many set backs, he buys his freedom. He has a few more voyages around the West Indies before heading off to England, because he’s tired of people trying to re-kidnap him. In England, he learns to be a hairdresser, but finds that life on land simply doesn’t pay and goes back to sea,
The most interesting voyage is the one for the Northern passage, where he goes into the Arctic. There he didn’t find Polar Bear as tasty as others, yet finds manatee like a tender beef. He also had to fight off walrus’s, which is an action scene I’d love to see. Other trips take him back to the West Indies, where a madman called Captain Baker threatens to explode his own ship and dozens and dozens of white men break promises to him.

The biggest thread of the post emancipation part of the story is his religious journey. He’s been tracing his faith through his life, ultimately seeing his capture and enslavement as part of God’s plan to drawn Vassa to Him. It’s funny, Vassa describes being a slave as ‘irksome’, he’s annoyed at all the white people trying to kidnap or cheat him, what brings him to the brink of suicide is Calvinist theology. Predetermination, the doctrine that God has pre-chosen who is saved and who isn’t, and good actions won’t change a thing, is a belief that causes him huge mental distresses till he finds himself in a life-and-death struggle and simply understands that he must be one of those pre-chosen people.

There are many life-and-death struggles in this book. I’ve seen it described as a slave narrative and as a protestant spiritual memoir - and I think both are influential, but only in the sense that they influenced Daniel Defoe, who I think is the main influence on this book. There’s something of Defoe’s accountant tone, with Vassa’s descriptions of the cargos he took on his voyages sounding a lot like the accounts of pickpocketing in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. The adventures of ships in storms and with creatures are very Defoe, and the spiritual wrangling remind me a lot of the religious journey taken by Robinson Crusoe. With his experiences in many places, as slave and freeman, Vassa is a real life Defoe protagonist. 
His life and narrative are certainly ‘interesting’ all right.

'This is Me' - of course it is.

 

Yesterday, the children at the performance club of the school I work at performed a three show run of an adaptation of The Greatest Showman. I’m the second adult in the club at so the de-facto assistant director (though the work has mainly been the other adult, she’s worked hard).

I signed up to help the club because I had to help one and I like performing. It was revealed what the performance was going to be after. At this point, I’d not actually seen The Greatest Showman, so my first job was to watch it. To be honest, I think it looks incredibly cheap. There are some awful cg enhanced shots and it simply didn’t convey the fun of the fair. I also found the re-telling of PT Barnum’s life to be absolutely baffling. Barnum is an interesting person, not a good person, but an interesting one. I’ve read a little about him and some of his performers and there’s a lot to unpack in Barnum and his relationships. I can see why a feel-good musical wouldn’t want to go into some of the grislier aspects of the story but I found it absolutely baffling that the character flaw given to Barnum (a flirted infidelity with Jenny Lind) was one of the few the real Barnum didn’t have. Why didn’t they just make it generic circus guy?

I’m partial to a musical. I’ve seen many of them on stage, I’ve even nicknamed my house Calamity Jane, but I never wanted to see this one.

The reason for that is the break-out song ‘This is Me’. I don’t like songs with ‘ohs’ in them very much and I found the subject generically dull. ‘This is Me’, of course it is. Are we not in an age of dull, anodyne, brand-savvy individualism? What else could a person write a song about these days?  

One of the people I’ve watched musical most with is my sister. We also try and watch Eurovision together and, if we can’t, we message each other throughout. This year, it was noticeable how many of the songs were cookie-cutter anthems of triumph about being yourself. It got boring. I really liked Nemo’s ‘The Code’ when it won last year, but seeing their new song this year, it was clear that Nemo only has one subject for songs… that being Nemo.

The other month I read a book called ’15 Lessons in New Thought’ by Elizabeth Towne. It was written in 1923 and contained life lessons from the perspective on New Thought, a mind-over-matter spiritualist movement that birthed Christian Science and influenced ideas of manifestation like ‘The Secret’. While it was the pseudo-scientific/pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo I was expecting (with a spicy hint of eugenics thrown in), I was surprised by the collective vision in it. The notion was that God is created from all the thoughts of all creation and his plan was not pre-determined but worked out by his creation, acting as nodes in his brain. If anything felt truly revolutionary in the book, it wasn’t the “your mind creates reality” bullshit, it was the notion of, “this is us”. 

“This is us” even makes better thematic sense in the musical than “this is me”, because the characters grow and become happier in themselves through the shared endeavour of putting on a show - the old Muppets formula. 

I couldn’t go into helping a production of The Greatest Showman with such a negative perspective though, I needed to find things I liked. The first thing I did was divorce the story from any true events, this was just the story of happy, handsome circus man and not any real person. I also had to acknowledge how much I enjoyed the choreography, especially in the song ‘The Other Side’ which is almost an OK Go video.

As time went on, I also started to enjoy the songs. ‘A Million Dreams’ is no ‘Rainbow Connection’ but it’s a sweet song, especially when sung by a group of forty children. The song I really started to like was ‘From Now On’. It follows a similar pattern to many songs in the show, someone starts off low, but through the power of the song ends triumphant. In this song, happy, handsome circus man has lost everything and feels like a chump for neglecting his friends and family. It begins full of the letter ‘I”. He sings about how he shall no longer be dazzled by fame and fortune. By the end of the song, all the ‘I’ has been replaced by ‘we’ and the chorus all sing how ‘we will come back home’. It was lovely to hear the ‘we’.