After his busy day on the moon, Bob the astronaut, we’re told, has a nice hot bath, because working on the moon can make you pretty ‘grubby’. And as my son doesn’t know the word ‘grubby’, I substitute the word ‘dirty’, when I remember. Except I don’t always remember, at which point he interrupts – somewhat tetchily – with the exhortation ‘Do “dirty”!’And I’ll tell you, that’s a pretty disconcerting phrase coming from the mouth of a two-year-old, especially when it’s aimed at his father. He says it to his mum, too, but I find that more acceptable. She’s a very attractive woman.
Amos Oz’s Help Us to Divorce isn’t really a book – it’s two little essays published between tiny soft covers. But as you can see, I’m desperate, so I have to include it here. Luckily, it’s also completely brilliant: the first essay, ‘Between Right and Right’, is a clear-eyed, calm, bleakly optimistic view of the Palestinian crisis, so sensible and yet so smart. ‘The Palestinians want the land they call Palestine. They have very strong reasons to want it. The Israeli Jews want exactly the same land for exactly the same reasons, which provides for a perfect understanding between the parties, and for a terrible tragedy,’ says Oz, in response to repeated invitations from well-meaning bodies convinced that the whole conflict could be solved if only the relevant parties got to know each other better. I wanted Oz’s pamphlet to provide me with quick and easy mental nutrition at a distressingly mindless time of year; it worked a treat. He kicked Bob the astronaut’s ass right into orbit.
A selection from
ASSASSINATION VACATION
by SARAH VOWELL
I live six blocks down Twenty-first Street from Gramercy Park and even though I walk by it every other day, I have been inside it precisely once, when my friend Nick, a Londoner, came to town and stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. How fitting that I cannot enter a park on my street without the escort of a subject of the British crown.
Nick gets the hotel’s bellman to unlock the gate for us. Then the bellman asks how long we would like to stay. Why does he care? Because he has to know when to come back and unlock the gate. Unbelievable.
Nick seems to like the park, but then he likes any place in America where he can smoke. We mosey toward Edwin’s behind. A life-size bronze in Elizabethan garb, his head’s bowed, as if he’s about to ask Hamlet’s that-is-the-question question. Like the Prince of Denmark, Edwin could have come up with at least three reasons not to be. For starters, little brother going down in history as the president’s killer was a cringing, galling shame. Before that, as a boy on the road with his drunken actor father, Junius Brutus Booth, when Edwin finally chose his own stage career over being Junius’s babysitter, the elder Booth only lasted a few days without him, drinking rancid river water and dying, sick, on the Mississippi. Though it’s hard to blame a kid for wanting more out of life than holding back his father’s hair every night as he vomited up his Shakespearean pay, Edwin felt responsible for Junius’s demise. Not that this guilt kept Edwin off the bottle. When Mary, his first and favorite wife, was lying on her deathbed in Boston, Edwin was in New York, too smashed to make the last train north. She was dead when he got there. He kicked himself for the rest of his life.
‘So who was he?’ Nick asks, pointing at Edwin’s statue.
‘Only the greatest Shakespearean actor of the nineteenth century.’
Says the English accent, ‘You mean, in America?’
Whatever. I let that slide. I’ve been dying to get inside this park for years, but eventually, I’m going to need Nick and his bellman to get me out.
I tell him how Edwin was known as the Hamlet of his day; how his father, Junius Brutus, was the greatest Shakespearean actor in England, until 1821, when he emigrated to Maryland, at which point he became the greatest Shakespearean actor in America; how three of Junius’s children became actors themselves – Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Brutus Jr; how the three brothers appeared onstage together only once, in Julius Caesar here in New York in 1864 as a benefit performance for the Shakespeare statue in Central Park; how their performance was interrupted because that was the night that Confederate terrorists set fires in hotels up and down Broadway and Edwin, who was playing Brutus, interrupted the play to reassure the audience; how the next morning Edwin informed John at breakfast that he had voted for Lincoln’s reelection and they got into one of the arguments they were always having about North versus South; how Edwin retired from acting out of shame when he heard his brother was the president’s assassin, but that nine months later, broke, he returned to the stage here in New York, as Hamlet, to a standing ovation; how he bought the house on Gramercy Park South and turned it into the Players Club, a social club for his fellow thespians and others, including Mark Twain and General Sherman; how he built his own theatre, the Booth, on Twenty-third and Sixth, where Sarah Bernhardt made her American debut; and how, in the middle of the Civil War, on a train platform in Jersey City, he rescued a young man who had fallen onto the tracks and that man was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, so he’s the Booth who saved a Lincoln’s life.
It is remarkable that Edwin earned back the public’s affection after his brother had committed such a crime. It says something about his talent and his poise that he could pull this off. I have a recording of Edwin, performing Othello, from an 1890 wax cylinder. It sounds like a voice from the grave, so thick with static the only phrase I can understand is ‘little shall I’. Though I cannot make out most of the words, something of Edwin’s gentleness comes across, a kind of wispy melancholy I can imagine inspiring more sympathy than scorn.
Perhaps this is the approach Dr Mudd’s grandson Richard should have taken. Instead of spending his very long life pestering state legislatures to pass resolutions recognizing his grandfather’s innocence, if he really wanted to get the country behind his family name, he should have recorded a hit song or come up with a dance craze or something.
In Bel Air, the Booths’ hometown in Maryland, Edwin is a local hero. The Edwin Booth Memorial Fountain stands in front of the courthouse, next to a sign announcing that Edwin made his theatrical debut in the building. A WPA mural in the post office depicts the scene: a gangly teenager in tails leans pompously toward the assembled audience, half of whom have their heads in their hands they look so bored. A roadside historical marker at Tudor Hall reads, ‘The home of the noted actor Junius Brutus Booth, the Elder. Birthplace of his children. His son Edwin Booth was born here November 13, 1833.’ That’s the whole sign. No mention of John Wilkes unless you count that cryptic reference to ‘his children’.
Edwin’s Players Club still exists in Gramercy Park. It remains the club Edwin envisioned, a fancy place for actors and their friends to get together. Edwin, the illegitimate son of a drunk, the heartbroken brother of an assassin, longed for propriety and elegance. He was an actor back when the theatre was one of the trashier professions. His actor brother offing the president in a theatre didn’t improve his profession’s profile. Thus did Edwin establish the Players. It’s a beautiful house. I’ve been inside a few times, mostly for literary events. The last time I went, after wandering around and admiring the Edwin memorabilia on display – the John Singer Sargent portrait of Edwin hanging over the fireplace, the helmet he wore as Brutus in Julius Caesar – I listened to a novelist confess that his childhood sexual awakening occurred while watching a Porky Pig cartoon in which Porky dressed up in high heels.
Edwin would have loved his statue in Gramercy Park – the first statue of an actor in the city. He warranted a stained-glass window too – a multicolored Shakespearean portrait in the Church of the Transfiguration on Twenty-ninth. Known as the Little Church Around the Corner, it became an actors’ church in the nineteenth century because it was the one church in town where actors would be granted a proper funeral.
The church hosted Edwin’s funeral on June 9, 1893. Just as his pallbearers were carrying his coffin out the door in New York, in Washington, three floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed. The building had been t
urned into a government office building after the Lincoln assassination. Twenty-two federal employees died.
APRIL 2005
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Saturday – Ian McEwan
Towards the End of the Morning – Michael Frayn
The 9/11 Commission Report
How To Be Lost – Amanda Eyre Ward
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life – Claire Tomalin
BOOKS READ:
Saturday – Ian McEwan
Towards the End of the Morning – Michael Frayn
Case Histories – Kate Atkinson
So Now Who Do We Vote For? – John Harris
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City – Nick Flynn
A few years ago, I was having my head shaved in a local barbers’ when the guy doing the shaving turned to the young woman working next to him and said, ‘This bloke’s famous.’
I winced. This wasn’t going to end well, I could tell. Any fame that you can achieve as an author isn’t what most people regard as real fame, or even fake fame. It’s not just that nobody recognizes you; most people have never heard of you, either. It’s that anonymous sort of fame.
The young woman looked at me and shrugged.
‘Yeah,’ said the barber. ‘He’s a famous writer.’
‘Well, I’ve never heard of him,’ said the young woman.
‘I never even told you his name,’ said the barber.
The young woman shrugged again.
‘Yeah, well,’ said the barber. ‘You’ve never heard of any writers, have you?’
The young woman blushed. I was dying. How long did it take to shave a head, anyway?
‘Name one author. Name one author ever.’
I didn’t intercede on the poor girl’s behalf because it didn’t seem to be that hard a question, and I thought she’d come through. I was wrong. There was a long pause, and eventually she said, ‘Ednit.’
‘Ednit?’ said her boss. ‘Ednit? Who the fuck’s Ednit?’
‘Well, what’s her name, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Ednit.’
Eventually, after another two or three excruciating minutes, we discovered that ‘Ednit’ was Enid Blyton, the enormously popular English children’s author of the 1940s and 1950s. In other words, the young woman had been unable to name any writer in the history of the world – not Shakespeare, not Dickens, not even Michel Houellebecq. And she’s not alone. A survey conducted by W. H. Smith in 2000 found that 43 per cent of adults questioned were unable to name a favourite book, and 45 per cent failed to come up with a favourite author. (This could be because those questioned were unable to decide between Roth and Bellow, but let’s presume not.) Forty per cent of Britons and 43 per cent of Americans never read any books at all, of any kind. Over the past twenty years, the proportion of Americans aged 18–34 who read literature (and literature is defined as poems, plays or narrative fiction) has fallen by 28 per cent. The 18–34 age group, incidentally, used to be the one most likely to read a novel; it has now become the least likely.
And meanwhile, the world of books seems to be getting more bookish. Anita Brookner’s new novel is about a novelist. David Lodge and Colm Toíbín wrote novels about Henry James. In The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about a guy writing a thesis on Henry James. And in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the central character’s father-in-law and daughter are both serious published poets and past winners of Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize for undergraduate poetry. And though nobody should ever tell a writer what to write about… Actually, forget that. Maybe somebody should. I have called for quotas in these pages before – I would have been great on some Politburo cultural committee – and I must call for them again. Nobody listens anyway. Sort it out, guys! You can’t all write literature about literature! One book a year, maybe, between you – but all of the above titles were published in the last six months.
There are, I think, two reasons to be a little queasy about this trend. The first is, quite simply, that it excludes readers; the woman in the barbers’ is not the only one who wouldn’t want to read about the Newdigate Prize. And yes, maybe great art shouldn’t be afraid of being elitist, but there’s plenty of great art that isn’t, and I don’t want bright people who don’t happen to have a degree in literature to give up on the contemporary novel; I want them to believe there’s a point to it all, that fiction has a purpose visible to anyone capable of reading a book intended for grown-ups. Taken as a group, these novels seem to raise the white flag: we give in! It’s hopeless! We don’t know what those people out there want! Pull up the drawbridge!
And the second cause for concern is that writing exclusively about highly articulate people… Well, isn’t it cheating a little? McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, the father and son-in-law of the poets, is a neurosurgeon, and his wife is a corporate lawyer; like many highly educated middle-class people, they have access to and a facility with language, a facility that enables them to speak very directly and lucidly about their lives (Perowne is ‘an habitual observer of his own moods’), and there’s a sense in which McEwan is wasted on them. They don’t need his help. What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states. That was the way Twain was smart, and Dickens; and that is surely one of the reasons why Roddy Doyle is adored by all sorts of people, many of whom are infrequent book-buyers. It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.
It goes without saying that Saturday is a very good novel. It’s humane and wise and gripping, just like Atonement and Black Dogs and just about everything McEwan has written. Set entirely on the day of the anti-war march in February 2003, it’s about pretty much everything – family, uxoriousness, contemporary paranoia, the value of literature, liberalism, the workings of the human brain – and readers of this magazine will find much with which they identify. I spent too much time wondering about Henry Perowne’s age, however. McEwan tells us that he’s forty-eight years old, and though of course it’s possible and plausible for a forty-eight-year-old man to have a daughter in her early twenties, it’s by no means typical of highly qualified professional people who must have spent a good deal of their twenties studying; at the end of the book (SKIP TO THE NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW), Perowne learns that he is about to become a grandfather, and this too bucks a few demographic trends. I belong to Henry Perowne’s generation, and my friends typically have kids who are now in their early-to-mid-teens. On top of that, I’m not sure that I am as consumed by thoughts of my own mortality as Perowne, although to be fair I’m a lot dimmer than he is, and as a consequence it may take me longer to get there. McEwan himself is fifty-six, and it felt to me like Perowne might have been, too. It doesn’t matter much, of course, but the author’s decision perhaps inevitably invites attempts at psychoanalysis.
It made me sad, thinking back to the day of the anti-war march. All that hope! All that confidence! And now it’s dwindled to nothing! I should explain that Arsenal beat Man Utd 2–0 that afternoon in an FA Cup match – my passionate opposition to the war was conquered by my passionate desire to watch the TV – and it looked as though we would beat them for ever. In fact, we haven’t beaten them since, and I finished Saturday in the very week that they thumped us 4-2 at Highbury to end all championship aspirations for the season.
Usually, when I read a novel I’m enjoying, I just lie there with my mouth open, occasionally muttering things like, ‘Oh, no! Don’t go in there!’ or, ‘You could still get back together, right? You love each other.’ But both Saturday and Kate Atkinson’s novel Case Histories contain detailed descriptions of places where I used to live and work, and as a consequence there were moments when I forgot to maintain even that level of critical engagement. Whenever Kate Atkinson mentioned Parkside, a street in Cambridge, I exclaimed – out loud, the first few dozen times
, and internally thereafter – ‘Parkside!’ (I used to teach at Parkside Community College, you see, so that was weird.) And then whenever Ian McEwan mentioned Warren Street, or the Indian restaurants on Cleveland Street, the same thing happened: ‘Ha! Warren Street!’ Or, ‘Ha! The Indian restaurants!’And if someone was in the room with me while I was reading, I’d say, ‘This book’s set around Warren Street! Where I used to live!’ (It’s not a residential area, you see, so that was weird, too.) It felt entirely right that I should read these books back-to-back, and then I was sent a copy of John Harris’s So Now Who Do We Vote For?, and I felt for a moment as though certain books were stalking me or something. Until someone writes a book called I Know Where You Put Your House Keys Last Night, I can’t imagine a title more perfectly designed to capture my attention.
I am sorry if the following lesson in UK politics is redundant, but I’m going to give it anyway: our Democrats are already in office. We voted the right way in 1997, and we have had a Labour government ever since, and at the time of writing it is absolutely certain that we will have one for the next five years: there will be an election some time in 2005, and Blair will walk it. As you may have noticed, the only problem is that the Labour government turned out not to be a Labour government at all. It’s not just that Blair helped to bomb Iraq; he’s also introducing the profit motive into our once-glorious National Health Service, and allowing some pretty dodgy people to invest in the education of our children. Sir Peter Vardy, an evangelical Christian car-dealer, wants creationism taught alongside theories of evolution, and in return for two million pounds per new school he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He already controls a couple of schools in the North of England.