Lockdown Time

Elastic Time
Time seems to exist in a multiverse in these times of Covid-19 Lockdown. I seem to have all the time in the world. And time passes like whispers in the wind. Is it April? Is it June? Was that Friday? Is this Saturday? Have I had breakfast? Did I sleep at all? Am I who I have always been? Or am I, my city, my country, my continent, my planet changing irrevocably? There have been personal earthquakes in recent times – some obvious political ones, but also natural disasters (The Year of the Flood) and personal convulsions (Beginning to Look Back). In my handwritten book of Helpful Life Quotations I can usually find something that fits most scenarios: in this case, Andy Warhol’s They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Distraction Techniques
I thought this peculiar “Lockdown” would be a perfect time to do a hundred jobs still undone: declutter shelves and cupboards, sort out books and photographs, tidy the cellar, finish writing my trilogy of novels. Instead I seem to have a problem with concentration and with not being able to stick to the easiest of plans. Freshly-crucial activities have risen to become weirdly compelling: planning shopping like a military campaign, watching Box Sets on TV, doing jigsaws, cooking, baking, cleaning, walking, Skyping, Zooming, reading, clapping, handwashing, watching and rewatching parody songs, witty memes and entertaining tiktoks. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wisely said Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time” is to say “I don’t want to.” I’m known for spending (wasting?) time imaginatively dreaming of time-travelling, lurking in Shakespeare’s language or being absorbed in the fantasy worlds of Narnia, Middle Earth, Pern, Westeros, Marvel Comics, Robin Hood and King Arthur. Why haven’t I spent more time in Wonderland during Lockdown? Why does making a Victoria Sponge suddenly seem so important?

Luxury of circumstances
In Lockdown I have the absolute privilege and luxury of living in a great house with plenty of resources. So when needed, I can marshall support easily. I can bathe in forests, stride across meadows and walk along the River Aire within minutes. I know other people are facing Lockdown under enormous pressures with vulnerable dependents, restricted movements, money worries, job worries, underlying mental and/or physical illnesses, the demands of children out of school, genuine fears about what tomorrow will bring. The distraction techniques of the latest tiktok don’t distract everybody. The endless summers of childhood only seemed endless because the “normal” world was operating within “normal” parameters and “normal” September would come around soon enough. Charles Darwin wrote: A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. Well, Darwin, my old mucker, as my bowl says, The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. If Lockdown has taught us anything, it is that Time can feel Elastic but Lockdown means nothing to Time. This too shall pass.

Would Shakespeare want us to leave Europe?

Great Britons

Shakespeare is one of the greatest Britons ever to have lived. He seems to be in the Top 20 of most lists I can find and in the huge survey conducted by the BBC in 2002 he sat comfortably at Number Five (after Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Diana Princess of Wales and Charles Darwin.) Other writers who (in my opinion) make the list without question are Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens – I think of Those Three as the writers who forever transformed Poetry (Chaucer), Drama (Shakespeare) and Prose (Dickens.) Nudging them (in alphabetical order) I would include the following writers for a variety of reasons: Jane Austen, William Blake, the Brontës, Agatha Christie, Caryl Churchill, CS Lewis, JK Rowling, GB Shaw, JRR Tolkien, Oscar Wilde and William Wordsworth and there are, of course, many more vying for attention. We have a truly great national tradition of writing that changed the reading and literary habits of the world, as did, I think, the ones I’ve mentioned.

Great Britons

Would Shakespeare, as a Great Briton, vote Remain or Brexit on June 23rd 2016?

I saw Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre recently and (one of) the villain(s) in that strange Romance is the thuggish Cloten who is definitely a Brexiter as he stands up to the Roman Empire by refusing to pay them tribute:

                            Britain is
A world by itself; and we will nothing pay
For wearing our own noses.

So is Cloten speaking for Shakespeare when he wants Britain to stand alone without paying out any money to any foreign power for trade rights and protection?

Current RSC Cloten Marcus Griffiths singing to Bethan Cullinane's Imogen, Anton Yelchin in the 2014 film of Cymbeline and Thomas Gorrebeeck's portrayal as the nationalist Cloten

Confirmation bias

As in the whole of Shakespeare’s work you can usually find a contradictory opinion because Shakespeare seems to see both sides of every human dilemma. The history play King John ends with lines that might well echo Cloten’s sentiments:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror….
….Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

The King of France and two King John Philip the Bastards: Pippa Nixon and Rikki Lawton

But these words are spoken by a cynical (though appealing and persuasive) character, Philip the Bastard. Conversely,  in the final scene of the more popular and potentially patriotic history play, Henry V, Shakespeare writes about England and France ceasing their hatred and hopes

                     ....this dear conjunction (will)    
Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord
In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance
His bleeding sword 'twixt England and fair France.

So does Shakespeare wants us to stand alone (“England to itself”) or work together in a group (with “neighbourhood and Christian-like accord”)? Perhaps we hear what we want to hear when we listen to Shakespeare, just as we tend to read newspapers or go to websites that already confirm what our opinions are.

Henry V with Donato Giancola's painting of Agincourt, Olivier and Branagh - a Shakespeare king as patriotic hero, senseless warmonger or bringer of peace to Europe - potentially all three

European settings

As well as locations throughout England, Shakespeare presented many European locations on the Jacobethan stage, even if there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever travelled abroad. In the plays we travel to Actium, Agincourt, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Bohemia, Cyprus, Elsinore, Ephesus, Florence, Harfleur, Illyria, Inverness, Mantua, Marseilles, Messina, Milan, Mytilene, Navarre, Orleans, Padua, Pentapolis, Philippi, Rome, Roussillon, Sicily, Tharsus, Troy, Tyre, Venice, Verona, Vienna. (Those places cover Europe and north Africa pretty widely: modern-day Austria, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Macedonia, Turkey, Scotland, Spain, Wales, Yugoslavia.) Shakespeare’s imaginative landscape was definitely outward-looking.

from Shakespeare Fangirl's Pinterest page

One step at a time

Attention must be paid

As Mark Forster eloquently explained (click to see blog here) you can only change things by Giving Attention to them.

Destroying a shed

Having decided to take down the wooden playhouse in the garden (to chop up for firewood for our stove…. gotta budget now we’re retired and make use of everything!...) it didn’t seem possible that it would ever be finished. It took three of us the best part of a week to deconstruct a roof, two floors joined by a ladder, four walls and a door. Many splinters later and having acquired aches and pains in places I didn’t know I had, today the final kindling was transferred to the cellar. God knows how many nails were claw-hammered out.

Courtesy of David Wolfe's Facebook posts

One step at a time

The biggest of tasks can be completed with a will and a willingness to surrender yourself to the time and attention it takes. One step at a time. The following quotation has been ascribed to both Henry Ford and Albert Einstein - it resonates with me every time I feel uncertain about doing something different.

Free scope

In All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s most under-rated plays, the complex and courageous Helena recognizes that if she remains “dull” (passive, inactive) then she will not be able to determine her own destiny; she has free scope and decides to find a remedy within herself.

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 

Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky 

Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull 

Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

Judi Dench as the Countess and Claudie Blakley as Helena in All's Well That Ends Well

The Once And Future King

Consistently in my Top Ten books, read at a formative age!

The Sum of the Parts

Like many Great Works (all of Shakespeare’s plays, for example) a modern editor could improve on individual sections of The Once And Future King, not least of which would be better scenes for the women in the stories. But the achievement of the entire work definitely fulfils Aristotle’s notion that the Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts. Why did it strike such a chord with me when I first read it? In The Sword in the Stone Wart’s surprising destiny taps into the common childhood fantasy that you are fated for greater things. Then along comes a great teacher to release innate qualities inside you, as Merlyn does for Wart or, in other famous fantasy books, Dumbledore does for Harry Potter at Hogwarts and Aslan the Lion does for the Pevensey children in Narnia.

Every parentless child in literature needs a "teacher figure"

The "Evil Austrian"

After the whimsical comedy of The Sword in the Stone, subsequent books see the deeper exploration of White’s bigger purpose – a plea for Right over Might. White was alarmed by the rise of Nazism during the composition of the novels and an "evil Austrian" is clearly referenced at one point; in context it is obvious White is thinking of Hitler. TH White had expressed to his friends that he thought the Matter of Britain (the Arthurian cycle) was the British version of the Greek Oresteia, a mythological tragedy that could capture the spirit of the nation. Thus jousting is equated with cricket, for example. The whole of The Once and Future King is an “antidote to war” (White’s own words) and a plea for fair government. Fair government! Now, THAT’S an idea!

Poster for John Boorman's film and Morgan Le Fey

The Queen of Air and Darkness

In Book Two, the Round Table is formed, King Pellinore goes in search of the Questing Beast and Arthur grows into his kingship. Most chapters take place in Orkney where Morgause, the Orkney Queen referenced in the book’s title, brings up her four sons: Gawain, Gaheris, Agravaine and Gareth.

Plenty of domestic wrangling, rough-and-tumble behaviour and derring-do takes place between the four brothers and, inevitably, being the youngest of four brothers myself, these four characters kept me turning pages to find out what they got up to next. In fact, their different personalities and their fates affect the rest of the work profoundly. It was easy to become hooked on an epic read with four brothers vying for their mother’s attention. I found The Queen of Air and Darkness very easy to identify with, not that my brothers and I ever beheaded a unicorn!

The Ill-Made Knight

And just when you thought you knew everything about the Arthurian tales, White’s third book provides a portrait of Sir Lancelot that defies all expectation.  He is ugly and tortured, yet becomes lovable and beloved, partly because of his critical self-awareness and partly because of his aspirations to be the best that he can be, in all things, despite his hideous appearance.  He is a relentless perfectionist.  Gareth, the youngest Orkney brother – me, in my imagination – remains loyal to Lancelot even when it is clear Lancelot’s love for Guinevere and his relationship with Elaine are causing painful complications and repercussions.

Lancelot, Guenevere and Arthur, the archetypal love triangle

Sir Galahad

Lancelot’s and Elaine’s pure son, Galahad, emerges as different to his father, not so much a perfectionist but an impossibly fine white-hot-blue-ice god-on-earth. Galahad is eye-hurtingly dazzling and annoying in his sheer uncompromising goodness. Lancelot never fulfills his own quest to be the best knight in the land because he cannot control his heart (and balls), but his illegitimate son, Galahad, attains physical and spiritual perfection.

The pure Sir Galahad and Santiago Cabrera as Sir Lancelot from the BBC TV series Merin

The Candle in the Wind

Before Elton John’s song was ever conceived, the phrase The Candle in the Wind was the title of White’s originally-published finale to The Once and Future King – the unravelling of the painfully sad outcomes for the legendary characters. The book ends with a poignant and witty encounter between Arthur and “Tom of Warwick,” the future Sir Thomas Malory, who is commissioned to write an account of all that has befallen – the book that becomes Le Morte d’Arthur.

King Arthur and "Tom of Warwick" in the musical Camelot

The Book of Merlyn

Published posthumously (1977) this additional volume of The Once and Future King is White’s explicit exploration of his anti-war sentiments.  Merlyn returns to Arthur on the battlefield and presents more evidence of the Laws of the Natural World (animals are harmonious and productive; humans are primitive and destructive.) The Circle of Life, in Merlin’s philosophy, is superior to the Ravages of War. Boyhood should beat American Sniper. Right should always beat Might and Mankind is doomed until he learns the lesson.

Themes and a warning

So what is The Once and Future King about beneath its Epic Narrative, its Giddy Satire, its Domestic Melodrama?  The Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? Themes include War, Peace, Justice, Chivalry, Love, Marriage, Families, Adultery, Incest, Friendship, Loyalty, Betrayal, Education, Ignorance, History, Fate, Self-determination, Courage, Cowardice, Magic and Time itself; one of TH White’s funniest conceits is that Merlyn lives his life backwards through Time.

Right is, or should be, Might.  Might should not rule Right.

Sleeping under a hill…. In Glastonbury, maybe?

The Once and Future King seems to mark the end of the Dark and Medieval Ages and bring the reader into Modern Times and it also seems to be warning, in the same vein as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that if the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb are amongst us then we are no further forward than we were in the Dark Ages. Right is not yet Might everywhere. Might often still prevails. Somewhere though, on the island of Avalon, King Arthur sleeps with his Knights of the Round Table, ready to emerge when Britain needs them most and re-establish a metaphorical Camelot for our time.

The Round Table hanging in Winchester Great Hall

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

Congratulations to Helen Macdonald for the prizes she has won (e.g. Samuel Johnson non-fiction, Costa book of the year) for H is for Hawk. Not to everyone’s taste (it seems from some nit-picking commentators) but the memoir’s success has revived interest in TH White, a writer from my own childhood that I’ve mentioned before. I am looking forward to reading Macdonald’s book when it is out in paperback but for now I’ve enjoyed the thought of it and reveled in the tangled muddle people get into whilst trying to fathom her use of the biography of TH White.
A Grief Observed
H is for Hawk concerns three strands: the grief Macdonald felt when her father died, her decision to train a goshawk named Mabel and the biography of TH White, the author of The Goshawk. The success of whether or not she succeeds in integrating these three strands is what the reviewers want to analyse. But as a fanboy reader I’m (oddly) looking forward to reading about grief; having retired it seems that bereavement is one of the most significant experiences in life – looking back and looking forward. I’d like to see how Macdonald expresses the earthquake of losing her father. The best account I’ve ever read, thus far, of grief is in CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a book I read soon after my Mum died.  I’m open to other suggestions….

Taming the Wild

I imagine that taming Mabel (the goshawk in the memoir) is equated with taming the self, taming the emotions, taming the grief. I might be wrong but taming has a long history in culture and literature from Taming of the Shrew (which I’ve seen and directed) to Barry Hines's Kestrel for a Knave (which I’ve read and taught) to 50 Shades of Grey (only a guess here since I haven’t read it – will I see the film?  Probably not.) In 1486 The Book of St Albans listed a falconry hierarchy so Golden Eagles were for Emperors, Falcons for Princes, Merlins for Milady, Sparrowhawks for a Priest and a Kestrel for a Knave. A Goshawk was for a Yeoman, a word surviving now for the Yeoman of the Guard at the Tower of London, but in medieval times probably meaning an employee of a noble household.

 The Goshawk

Helen Macdonald cites her reading of TH White’s The Goshawk as an event that inspired her in her teenage years. I read a copy borrowed from Wakefield Library in the summer before I was fifteen. Why did I choose it to read? My older brother had been interested in birds of prey and the film of Kes had made a permanent and formative impact. I knew that TH White had written The Sword in the Stone, the book on which the Disney film was based but I hadn’t read that, just enjoyed the cartoon. So it seemed to fit the creed of my charismatic English teacher, Mary Cohen, a book that “called” to me instinctively. Don’t choose books because you feel you should read them, she taught. Choose books that choose you. Don’t read a book you are not enjoying; stop it and choose another. Reading is for pleasure, for escapism, for opening your heart, mind and soul.  

Violence and War

The Goshawk completely floored me. I ought to re-read it since I am only remembering the impressions it left on me. It felt like a book about the sadness and tragedy of the human race, an account of White’s dread of the effects of violence and war. I remember crying in a central section (no spoilers) and at the end feeling a wild sense of optimism. It took me on an imaginary rollercoaster of emotions. It revealed allegory to me in a powerful way.This book that contained diagrams and instructions about hawking also posed questions about man’s inhumanity to man, through the interactions the narrator had with the natural world. I suppose I’m hoping Helen Macdonald’s memoir is going to do something similar for me. Should I be even writing about a book that I haven’t read yet? Sometimes anticipating a book can cause flights of fantasy.... and The Goshawk led directly to the book that changed my life.... 

One thing leads to another....

Game-changing Novels

So my daughter was asked to name her Top Ten Most Influential Books -  not the BEST, nor the GREATEST, nor the ones you've READ RECENTLY, nor the ones you think SHOULD BE on a top ten list.

What are the ten novels that have been MOST INFLUENTIAL on your life?  The ones that CHANGED THE GAME for you?  The ones that, after reading, your life was forever different?

Harriet's list

Harriet’s list was (in alphabetical order of title):

Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Far Cry - Emma Smith
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Sum: Tales from the Afterlives - David Eagleman
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
A Town like Alice - Nevil Shute
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

My list

Here are mine (in order of the age, roughly, when I first read them):

Lord of the Flies – William Golding (read aged 14)
The Once And Future King – TH White (read aged 15)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (read aged 17)
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee (read aged 17)
Great Expectations  - Charles Dickens (read aged 20)
Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey (read aged 24)
The Sea The Sea – Iris Murdoch (read aged 28)
A Man of his Word/A Handful of Men – Dave Duncan (read aged 38)
The Sunne in Splendour – Sharon Penman (read aged 40)
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood (read aged 48)

What do I notice about the books that changed things for me forever?  History, myth, fantasy, love and violent actions are common threads.  Six of the ten works are written by women.  Should I have worked harder to include books by writers I admire like Alice Hoffmann or Anne Tyler, Philip Pullman or CS Lewis?  What about my childhood obsession, Enid Blyton?

What was I heartbroken to miss out?

Close misses from the list include (alphabetical by surname of writer) I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Emma by Jane Austen, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, Howards End and A Passage to India by EM Forster, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Rainbow by DH Lawrence, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Treasure Island by RL Stevenson, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

If anyone knows me well, and wants to prompt me with anything I’ve forgotten – or provide their own list, please do so.  I might attempt a future blog about poets/poems/plays – but might have to exclude Shakespeare because of the impossibility of choosing between his creations….