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| Memoir 'Last Words' is pure George Carlin Told in his own voice, this posthumous work by the cranky provocateur is as much a moving tribute as it is a taste of what could ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Geoffrey Moorhouse obituary Guardian journalist turned author who wrote a bestselling account of his travels in the Sahara desertGeoffrey Moorhouse, who has died aged 77, was a Guardian journalist of deep integrity who moved out of daily newspapers to write books on a variety of themes, most often invoking the human spirit. One book in particular, The Fearful Void (1974), is remembered some 35 years later in revealing in its author, as one critic put it, a sublime madness.Aged 40, without previous experience of the desert, or of camels, how to navigate or local languages, he decided to attempt the first solo west-to-east crossing of the Sahara, some 3,600 miles. His was not a journey simply to conquer a physical barrier, but more a voyage of self-discovery: he wished to come to terms with his own fears about life. Cross the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Nile, he felt, and he could do anything.After five months and some appalling hardships – not least the death of three camels, the dishonesty of companions (he found that he could not travel alone), dysentery that seemed never-ending, feet that were forever blistered, food ghastly to his western tastes – he gave up the struggle, still 2,000 miles from his destination. But in many an interview, he said he now understood himself better, even in failure. His account, although not pleasant reading, was a success on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Britain a bestseller, which he greeted with a wry comment about almost having to die before readers took an interest.This was his sixth book, and more than 20 more would follow. As a reporter, Moorhouse had proved himself a generalist who acquired knowledge, as he once confessed to me, as "a jack of all trades". His books showed an eclecticism in his nature but were never less than expert in their research and writing.Born in Bolton, Lancashire (his surname was that of his stepfather), he was educated at Bury grammar school. He once recollected how much he learned at school about composition, but later made what he called his "great discovery through Orwell", that "labouring to develop a distinctive style was a fruitless exercise". He did his national service in the Royal Navy before joining the Bolton Evening News. After two years, and aged 23, he left for New Zealand. He not only worked on newspapers there, but also met his first wife, Jan. He brought her back to England in 1957 and for a few months worked in London for the News Chronicle, by then in decline. In 1958 he moved to the Manchester Guardian.Finding himself drawn to church affairs as a reporter – he was, he said, "pickled" in the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible – he wrote Against All Reason (1969), a highly praised investigation of monastic life. He was also enthralled by architecture and was with the historian Nikolaus Pevsner when he scrutinised the very last entry for his Buildings of England, Butterfield's parsonage at Sheen, Surrey. Later, Moorhouse's inquisitiveness led him to write about missionaries and diplomats, as well as lobster fishermen off the New England coast.At the Guardian, he became chief features writer in 1963, a post he held until he quit in 1970 for full-time book writing. In 1968, he took his turn covering the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, where he used his knowledge of trains to gain a modest scoop. Frustrated at being one of 500 foreign correspondents held at bay at KoÅ¡ice, some 10 miles from where the Russians were trying to browbeat the Czech leader, Alexander Dubcek, at Cierna, it occurred to him that, as the meeting was taking place at the town's railway institute, there must also be a railway line. The next morning he rose early and circumvented the security cordon by catching a workmen's train, bound for Cierna. Although he was discovered soon after arrival and returned to KoÅ¡ice, Moorhouse was able to file 800 self-deprecating words of his experience for the next morning's paper.Four of his books were based on the Indian sub-continent. The first, Calcutta (1971), remains a classic and led him to write two other city books, New York (1988) and Sydney (1999) – his metropolitan trilogy, as he called them. In the early 1980s, he travelled in Pakistan to its border with Afghanistan and the result, To the Frontier (1984), won him the Thomas Cook travel book award. It was, though, originally suppressed in Pakistan by the regime of General Zia on the grounds that it was anti-Islamic.He also wrote knowledgably about two sports – cricket and rugby league. His love of cricket (he followed Lancashire all his life) led him to write The Best Loved Game (1979), which won him the Cricket Society award, and, in 1983, Lord's, a study of the home of cricket, particularly the MCC. Moorhouse's volume of essays about rugby league (he supported Wigan), At the George (1989), led him to be made the game's official historian for its centenary in 1997.As he grew older and travelled less – and having survived a near-fatal heart attack – he turned to history, working from his home in Gayle, a village in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire. Hell's Foundations (1992) was about the effect that the Gallipoli campaign of the first world war had on the Lancashire town of Bury, whose young men formed the bulk of the 5th battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers and failed to return. He followed it with three books of Tudor history: The Pilgrimage of Grace (2002), on the popular uprising that almost toppled Henry VIII; Great Harry's Navy (2005), concentrating on the origins of the Royal Navy; and The Last Office (2008), which told of the dissolution of the monasteries through the example of Durham. The praise it received particularly pleased him, as that book brought together many of his life's interests.That year, a novel by the New Zealand writer Janet Frame – Towards Another Summer – was published posthumously. Moorhouse and his first wife, who had given hospitality to Frame in the early 1960s, appear in the novel. Moorhouse thought the portrait of his wife excellent, but hoped he wasn't "as plonkingly earnest" as Frame had drawn him.With Jan, he had two sons and two daughters. The younger daughter, Brigie, died of cancer in 1981. Jan was by then married to another Guardian man, Geoffrey Taylor. Moorhouse married again twice, but each marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner, Susan Bassnett, his daughter, Jane, and sons Andrew and Michael.Peter Preston writes: There were two great feature writers on the staff when I became features editor of the Guardian four decades ago. One was Terry Coleman, master of the full dress interview. The other was Geoffrey. And he was special, too.Geoffrey was quiet, brooding, very northern, always fascinated by time and place, as well as surface events. He was a reporter who delved and pondered, getting the facts right, making sure that the slices of life he portrayed were true. He believed in people and making their lives available for a broader audience. He had a quizzical eye and a gentle, reflective sense of humour. And, whether evoking a street market in Blackburn or Bologna, he was always detailed.It was probably inevitable, as his own life moved on, that he would find the role of author-reporter more fulfilling than that of feature writer on demand, given the latter's requirement of hours rather than months to turn a rich idea around. Moving on was a great career move. But the Geoffrey I shall always remember, wry, precise, in no sense overbearing, was and remained a great reporter with the most precious gift a reporter can possess: to be able to write as well as he can observe, to describe what he sees in a way that makes it memorable.WL Webb writes: Geoffrey reminded me recently that I had given him his first byline in the Guardian – a sketch of the kind once known as a "back-pager", about a stroppy curate getting on the wrong side of his Lancashire bell-ringers – and generally encouraged him in the late 1950s to push on and become one of the paper's stars.We spent much time together in 1968, covering the Prague Spring and taking turns to guard jealously from other desperate reporters an ancient teleprinter in a dingy hotel that needed much coaxing to send our copy out. Geoffrey's concentration was ferocious. Once, when I tried to interrupt him in full spate to explain some Czech speech that had just changed the story, he took a wild swing at me, as I struggled to stop him typing away.The same restless energies drove him on his solo slog across the Sahara and through all his other formidably researched and experienced books, until he came to rest in the Wensleydale he loved and celebrated so warmly in his north country pastorals in the Oldie.• Geoffrey Moorhouse, writer, born 29 November 1931; died 26 November 2009The GuardianNewspapersPakistanAfghanistanNew ZealandPeter Prestonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Editor & Publisher' closing after 108 years The Nielsen Co. is selling some of its most prominent trade journals including The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard and shutting ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Pauline Melville interview 'I looked English; it was a relief to write stories that expressed the other side'Twenty years ago, Pauline Melville was violently attacked in her north London flat by a man on licence from Broadmoor. As she fought for her life, she imagined how it would feel to be the one breaking the rules. "Even at the time, I understood what it was like to be him," she recalls of the night in Highbury when she awoke to find an intruder in her bedroom. "I felt how powerful it is when someone discards all the laws you live by to do the most outrageous things. It wasn't that it was admirable – but it was fascinating."After the attacker was caught, she fictionalised the event in a chilling tale, "You Left the Door Open". Its narrator is a cabaret artist – as Melville then was. But the terror of the woman's prolonged struggle, attempted bargaining, sexual assault and eventual escape through a garden window, is framed by myth and mystical coincidence. She wonders whether she might have opened an "invisible door to some infernal region", because the "demon", who names himself after a Victorian murderer, bears an uncanny resemblance to a predatory male persona she had invented for her cabaret act.The imaginative power to inhabit others' lives, and ventriloquise voices, nourished Melville's early life as an actor and stand-up comic. She began working in theatre in the 1960s, and appeared in films including Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mona Lisa (1987), and in television comedy series such as The Young Ones and Blackadder. "There's almost nobody in the world I can't imagine myself being," she says.It might also have steered her turn to fiction. Her debut collection, Shape-Shifter (1990), was published when she was in her mid-40s. Spanning Britain and Guyana – her father's homeland – its stories follow life's losers and down-and-outs in shape-shifting, protean prose, its polyphony of characters veering from Creole to cockney, posh to patois. The collection won the Guardian fiction prize, a Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen award. Penelope Fitzgerald admired her "wonderful ear for living voices", while Salman Rushdie found it sharp and funny, "part Caribbean magic, part London grime, written in a slippery, chameleon language".Between that and her second collection, The Migration of Ghosts (1998), came The Ventriloquist's Tale (1997), a novel set in 19th-century British Guiana. It won the Whitbread first novel award and was shortlisted for the Orange prize. For Rushdie, who was Melville's next-door neighbour in the mid-1980s and remains a friend, she is a "wildly original and strange writer". She was then, he says, "full of funny stories about acting", but he also recalls her "creating, for a stand-up routine, a male persona that she then had to stop doing because he became so evil that he frightened her".Melville still lives in Highbury, in a flat whose study overlooks a tranquil garden with palms. That long-ago attack, she says, may have been on her mind while writing her second novel, Eating Air, published by Telegram this past autumn. She sees the book as reflecting her fascination with "people who transgress the rules". The heroine is Ella de Vries, a ballet dancer whose father is from Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), and the novel melds autobiographical elements with myth and invention. Moving mainly between the 1970s and the present day, it marshals a wild cast of radical thespians and would-be revolutionaries, urban bombers and Islamists, kidnappers and spies, bankers and philistine patrons of the arts, in a sometimes farcical plot to blow up an Amsterdam bank – a "popular gesture" in the teeth of bankers' bonuses.Her interest was in exploring "terrorism, or revolutionary action, not from the point of view of left or right, but of extremism – whether in love, politics or religion; an attraction to danger against a safer, cosier life." The novel imagines an encounter between Europe's urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s, such as Italy's Brigate Rosse or Britain's Angry Brigade, and present-day Islamism, at a time when some old-style urban bombers are coming out of jail, just as Islamists are going in. She senses a kinship, "not to do with political ideology, but with desire. Whether it's ETA or the IRA, or Gavrilo Princip – whose assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo triggered the first world war – there's a youthful energy and idealism. I didn't want to look at the morality of it, just the excitement and passion, the risk and adventurousness. Most assassins are only about 18 years old."Ella's husband Donny McLeod, a "gallivanter" and "connoisseur of pure rebellion", who scorns the notion of dying for an idea, owes something to Melville's husband Angus, to whom the novel is dedicated. A trawlerman from the Scottish highlands, he was working on a building site when they met in a London pub when she was a teenager. "Angus is still a bit of a mystery to me," she says. "We don't always live together – he's a nomad, and I've always left myself a get-out clause in relationships. But there's also this bond that doesn't get broken." Yet Donny is also Dionysus, and there are echoes of The Bacchae of Euripedes, and Venus and Adonis. She found inspiration in Conrad and Greene, Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and Granny Made Me an Anarchist, by Stuart Christie, the Briton jailed in Spain for plotting to assassinate General Franco. She also admires the Guyanese-born British novelist Wilson Harris for his "weaving of myth and reality".The germ of the novel was an image that came to her, soon after September 11, of a "huge catastrophe with a plane in a building, and a woman lying down in the rubble, pretending to be a victim." Ella's friend Hetty is an American drama queen with a penchant for emotional blackmail. Melville also takes pot shots at a utopian architect who never built anything; playwright Victor Skynnard, whom she sees as a "conglomerate of fading lefties"; and the mercurial celebrity actor and political activist Vera Scobie, who saves a group of tortured Uzbeks but drops them when her exiled son comes home. Despite the satirical undertow, Melville expresses affection for some of her targets. "I am scathing because a lot of silly things were going on. But I'll often uphold the ideals."Her instincts, she says, have always been against big business, possibly mindful of Guyana's vast Demerara sugar plantations, built on slave and indentured labour. In her view, all the things that people feared would be brought about by communism – including, the novel notes, "bland uniformity, cloned cities, secret prisoners and omnipresent surveillance" – are being "brought about by capitalism, and nobody recognises it. People mistake the freedom of the market for democracy."Both open and elusive, garrulous yet guarded, Melville says this is only the second British press interview she has given in almost two decades (the first was when she won the Guardian fiction prize). "The more you're in the limelight the less you see, because the gaze is fixed on you." She prefers to remain inconspicuous, yet hints with mischief that that desire is the "hallmark of the predator who prefers to be watcher, not watched. I hate to feel like a butterfly pinned to a board."Her pre-school years in the 1940s were spent in the colony of British Guiana. Her father was "mixed-race Guyanese, part South American Indian, African and Scottish", and her mother came from a "big working-class family" in south London. They had met in Cuba while her mother was on a break from working on the Canadian railways. The family (she has two sisters) moved to south London in the early 1950s, when she was "five or six". She remembers "the greyness, and somebody shouting, 'your father looks like a monkey.'"Her father, who worked for a sugar company, fell ill with tuberculosis, spending long spells in a sanatorium. Melville had TB as a teenager. "I hadn't known my father had it; in England it was a great disgrace, to do with poverty and immigrants."In "Mixed", an early poem, she wrote: "Sometimes, I think / My mother with her blue eyes / And flowered apron / Was exasperated / At having such a sallow child, / And my mulatto daddee / Silenced / By having such an English-looking one." She finds people can be fazed by her background. While she used to feel she was "passing" for white ("I heard a racist conversation at a dinner party; it made me feel like a spy"), she met resentment in the Caribbean during 1970s black power from those "more worried at my passing myself off as black". In "Beyond the Pale", an essay for Margaret Busby's anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), Melville wrote that, with her slave ancestor's baptism certificate in her drawer, she was well placed for "stirring up doubt, rattling judgments, shifting boundaries, unfixing fixities" – and surveying the ludicrous. Of the now-faded fad for roots and identity politics, she wrote that, had Bob Marley chosen to pursue his father's Anglo-Scottish ancestry, "he might have ended up in a kilt in the Highlands, singing 'will ye no'come back again?'" Shortly after writing that essay, Melville found out that she had sickle cell trait, which occurs mostly in black people. "It wasn't a shock to me, but it was to the doctors."From childhood, she derived a "sense of separateness that may have made me into an observer. I knew I came from something else." When her father died, "we couldn't bury him here because he never belonged here." Yet, "because of my mum, class was more important to me. My grandfather worked in a sawmill, and my mother was the second of 10 children. I've always been aware of that; it's affected my politics."On leaving school in the early 1960s, she worked at London's Royal Court theatre. Inspired by a talk given by George Devine and Joan Littlewood, she was taken on as an understudy. "But you did everything then – assistant director, casting, read new plays, swept the stage." It was a "short period of innovation and passion, and I met some of the greatest writers and actors. Unfortunately, I was too young and ignorant to know I was in a pub chatting away to Samuel Beckett." The director Lindsay Anderson "took me under his wing. He took me to Russian films – things I'd never been exposed to." She moved to the National Theatre run by Laurence Olivier, in a "golden period", working as assistant to such directors as Franco Zeffirelli, John Dexter and William Gaskill.Her first film part was as a teenage whore in Ulysses (1967). But feeling "uneducated", she took a sandwich course in psychology and economics at Brunel university in 1970-74. It was a "great period of political education, endless meetings, activism". The strikes and protests against Edward Heath's Conservative government are a backdrop to Eating Air. Looking for a way to "marry art and politics", she worked with the Joint Stock Theatre Company, and the Scottish theatre company 7:84 – which "went out to trade unions and factories".After Guyanese independence in 1966, she became involved in political movements in the region, including in Chile. As a teenager, she felt "very English. I didn't want to know about Guyana. But gradually, I realised there was another history." She was flying into the country in 1980 when the Guyanese historian and pan-Africanist Walter Rodney was killed by a car bomb. "There was great horror and fear. I knew his brother, who was blown up with him." After the assassination, she worked at the Jamaican school of drama, and taught literacy in Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement in Grenada, which was curtailed by the Reagan invasion of 1983.It was in Jamaica that she began to write fiction: "My life in the theatre, though I loved it, was never going to allow me to express my background. I looked English; it was a relief to write stories that expressed the other side." Her first story, about a pregnant Jamaican shoplifter, drew on teaching experience in Holloway prison. In the Caribbean she wrote about Europe, and in London, about Guyana. Theatre shaped her fiction: she tends to "think in scenes", and her narrators step in like a chorus.She was drawn to stand-up in the 1980s after joining the Sadista Sisters, a rock cabaret act. "I did it for the hell of it, and because there were things I wanted to mock," she says. "It was all improvised." She started alongside Alexei Sayle (with whom she co-wrote a film) and Keith Allen, and "within a month we were running up and down cellars like pit ponies. It became 'alternative comedy'. It was wild and savage, but for me it was a political tool, not a career."She also spent time with relatives in Guyana's Rupununi savannah, a remote region near the Brazilian border peopled mainly by Wapisiana Indians, where her part-Indian ancestors were well-off cattle ranchers. The Ventriloquist's Tale was partly a riposte to Evelyn Waugh, whose travels in British Guiana in 1933 fed A Handful of Dust. In an afterword in 2007 to Waugh's travelogue Ninety-Two Days, Melville recalled her indignation at his scorn for the "nauseating hospitality of savages" – one of whom saved his life. Waugh mentions a Mr Melville, of white Jamaican-Scottish ancestry, who settled down with two Wapisiana sisters as wives, and had 10 children. Waugh's diaries also refer to a "dotty bastard nephew, son of John Melville by his three-quarter sister." That hint of incest among her forebears lies at the heart of the novel.She recently spent years compiling a Wapichan dictionary with a cousin, aware of "how extraordinary the translations are – the word for snack is 'liar', because it lies to your stomach that you're full. It's being overwhelmed by English, and is likely to die out."Though Melville no longer does stand-up, she senses a "great need for satire. There's no movement against corporate democracy, just shards of comedy that keep pricking at it." As she sees it, artists and comedians are restorers of balance. "When society starts going in one direction, they start pulling in the other. When there's an excess of power, a novelist or comedian will try to correct it."PoetryMaya Jaggiguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Most stagings of Shakespeare don't go far enough When a high-profile Shakespeare production gets inventive with the Bard, critics sometimes grumble. But occasionally the shock approach can help us appreciate how radical the playwright really wasWe're meant to suppose there's no such thing as traditionally staged Shakespeare, but I wonder if that's right: actors declaiming verse in an inoffensive jumble of period costumes has become the new norm. Sometimes the director settles on one epoch, as Rupert Goold did with his Stalinist Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart. Otherwise, Shakespeare is a vehicle for a designer's interpretation (see Cheek by Jowl's recent Cymbeline, draped in 1930s couture and film noir atmospherics). You can be fairly sure that Sam Mendes will unveil something similar when As You Like It and The Tempest begin their repertory run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a mixed English and American cast.Still, every so often critics like to denounce director-driven Shakespeare as belittling the Bard's genius. In an interview for the online magazine Big Think last month, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout groused about concept-driven Shakespeare, which he epitomised as on-stage jeeps and machine guns. Shakespeare doesn't have to be "transgressive", Teachout proclaimed. "It's actually now more common to see conceptual productions … [in] which Hamlet is played as a Nazi, or a homosexual." Let's ignore, for the moment, how blithely Teachout glides from gays to brownshirts. There's a larger ideological agenda here: how much should the Bard reflect our times? Shakespeare wrote a great deal about war, soldiering and tyranny, not to mention gender inequality and racism. You can't avoid politics in his work – unless you try really hard. Teachout isn't bothered by modern-dress Shakespeare, per se; he just disapproves when you translate the militarism into stark modern terms. You suspect he'd be fine watching the English soak Agincourt's soil with French blood, but he'd rather you not allude to Iraq or Afghanistan. I also wince at conceptual Shakespeare, but for another reason: most directorial concepts are far too timid. Shakespeare was a moderate, nonsectarian humanist? Nonsense. Why not assume that if the Bard were alive, he'd be a bug-eyed anarchist or an eco-terrorist (he did love nature imagery, after all). Shakespeare, that notorious mixer-up of comedy and tragedy, certainly wouldn't be churning out well-behaved divertissements for conservative critics. And we're lying if we say we know how his plays should be staged, or that we find every single syllable equally pellucid and penetrating. It's 2010, and Shakespeare's language is a glorious, perplexing welter of ageless, soul-stirring verse, antique jokes, irrelevant cultural prejudices, blazingly vital characters and obsolescent verbiage. Translation (metaphorically speaking) and innovation are key to preserving these overdone classics. So, no, I don't think schoolchildren should see their first Lear played by a teenage girl in a spaceship, but I'd watch it. Smuggle a perverse political agenda into that pastoral comedy. Use computer-generated performers. Cast nonactors alongside professionals. Go site-specific. Stretch the performance time over two days. Can anyone – as Harley Granville-Barker, Orson Welles and Peter Brook did – achieve a genuine breakthrough?Jude Law's Hamlet didn't topple any paradigms, even if I enjoyed Michael Grandage's Donmar transfer on Broadway. I dubbed it "yoga Hamlet," in which our melancholy Dane squatted in chic, stretchy gray pants, limber and fit. Law handled his lines with verve and zest, but overall, this was Shakespeare as ahistorical pageant. Cultural accessory, not necessity. Would I have minded if Grandage asked Law to play the prince as a gay Nazi? Bring on the pink swastika. William ShakespeareTheatreDavid Coteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |