To kill off forever that old canard that 'the Germans don't have a sense of humour', I bring you Der Untertan and the satirical novelist Heinrich Mann

My mother was German and my father was English. When I was very young, my mother spoke to my brother and myself in German, so although I didn’t learn to speak German until I was a little older, I learnt to unserstand it as, growing from being a toddler to being a young child, I learnt to understand English. French, Spanish, Italian, Russian etc were and are foreign languages as far as I am concerned, but English and German are my languages. It feels as natural to hear German spoken as it does English.

In 1959, my father was appointed the BBC representative in Berlin, or West Berlin as it was then, and we moved to the city in June. (My father’s appointment to a post in Berlin at the height of the Cold War might not have just been for journalistic reasons, but that would be for another entry in this blog.) For a month or two, we lived in a very spacious flat in the Olympische Straβe in Neu Westend in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, just down the road from Berlin's Olympic stadium (hence the name- neat or what?). When we arrived at the beginning of June, the weather was hotter than I had ever experienced before – 40c in the shade – and although Berlin regularly had consistently warmer summers and colder winters than I had known in the ‘Home Counties’ in Henley-on-Thames where I grew up, the summer of 1959 was particularly hot even by Berlin standards.

We spent almost every afternoon at an open-air swimming pool, and I remember eating, I think for the first time ever, peaches and apricots, and eating a great deal of them. It was an irony that Germany, the ‘loser’ in World War II, abandoned ‘rationing’ far earlier than Britain, which had ‘won’ World War II. And although rationing had been abandoned in Britain six years earlier, there still seemed to linger a 'ration' mentality.

I can remember visiting in those early days and weeks of the four years I spent in Berlin, an open-air market on, or near, the Preuβenallee, and being astounded by the plenty. Henley in those days, although already a town for monied people, was still a dusty and, in my recollectons, rather scruffy Oxfordshire town when I grew up there in the Fifties. Where you will now find any number of bistros and estate agents and wine bars and boutiques on Hart Street, the main drag leading up from the bridge to the Town Hall (all Town Halls deserve capital letters), when I was growing up there, we had Frank Gilbride the butcher, a Boots which still had a lending library upstairs and any number of pubs. In the 400 yard stretch from the bridge up there were, I think, at least seven pubs.

In Germany, the autumn school term started at the end of August, and my older brother, Ian, was enrolled in Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit secondary school (which, I gather, was then as now a school of some repute) in Berlin-Tiergarten. I was not yet ten years old, so I was enrolled in a local primary school, Die Steubenschule, which was about a 20-minute walk away down near the Heerstraβe. That was when Ian and I learnt to speak German. Several years later, it was said that Ian spoke more correct German than I did, but that I spoke more natural German. Ian was always the better linguist.

I must be honest that although I was bilingual at the time, I now longer get much of an opportunity to speak German, and it now takes me several days to get back into the swing of speaking it as a native, But then, once that transition has been accomplished, I often find that my English goes, temporarily, which is very odd and I even start thinking in German.

In my time at the Steubenschule, I partly learnt German by reading Kasperle books. Kasperle was a folk figure quite closely related to our Mr Punch. And although these days I don’t often get the chance to speak German (although my knowledge of the language was useful when I translated items for Tully Potter when he was writing his biography of Adolf Busch), I have kept up a habit of reading a German novel every so often. Over the years these have included Der Steppenwolf (which made more sense to me as a fortysomething than it does, I'm sure to any number of teen rebels and solipsists), and two novels by Heinrich Mann: Professor Unrat and Der Untertan.

For some reason, I have never read any of Thomas Mann’s novels, neither in German or English. Heinrich and his brother Thomas were both novelists of repute, and although both are equally well-known and respected in Germany, Thomas is far better known in the English-speaking world.

Heinrich Mann (pictured), the older of the two, had a decidedly satirical bent and wisely left Germany, never to return when the Nazis came to power in 1933. One distinguishing feature of totalitarian states of every stripe (well, strictly speaking there can only be one stripe) is that having a good laugh at their own expense doesn't come easily. Another particular distinguishing feature of the Nazis was their outstanding intellectual mediocrity and it close friend sentimentality. (Oscar Wilde once observed that 'sentimentality is a Bank Holiday from cynicism' and when you look at the Nazis, you know exactly what he meant.)

Professor Unrat was the basis of Josef von Sternberg’s famous film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), although oddly – and I don’t know why, though my memory might be at fault as I haven’t seen the film for years – von Sternberg only utilised part of the novel for his film and in the process transformed the personality of the central character. If I remember, the film ends with the total humiliation of Unrat, played be Emil Jannings (pictured below with Marlene Dietrich), whereas in the novel, he


gets his own back to a certain extent by opening a brothel cum casino on the outskirts of town which counts as it best customers all the local great and good who otherwise condemn him and what he has made of his life. is In that sense, what von Sternberg produced was not a film of the novel, but a film based on the novel.

I read Der Untertan when I was living in London in the early Nineties (lodging with the Orams in the Fulham Road). I can’t for the life of me remember why I chose to read it, but I do remember tootling off to Warwick Street to The German Bookshop, which was called something else at the time, I think, to get it. Remember, we didn't have Amazon in pre-Steve Jobs/Bill Gates dark ages.
Der Untertan is viciously satirical, but - and this is the point - it is also hilariously funny. It satirises Germany and German life under Wilhelm II when obedience to authority was for many the be all and end all of life. (Another great satire is Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, Carl Zuckmayer's play which was based on real events and is substantially true. Again, more another time.)

The protagonist of Der Untertan, Diederich Hessling – it would be completely wrong to call him a hero and who I always imagine as pasty-faced and a little overweight - is utterly in thrall to authority, power and society's convention, and worships the Kaiser. He is also a thorough and nauseating hypocrite. A good example of his hypocrisy is the following: while he is a student in Berlin, he gets to know the daughter of a friend of his father’s, becomes infatuated with her and seduces her. After clearly intimating that he will marry her, he drops her and she is brokenhearted.

Eventually, just before he is due to leave Berlin and return home to take over the family firm, the girl’s father calls on him to confront him and asks why he no longer calls and particularly why he no longer calls on his daughter. The girl's father intimates that he more or less knows that Hessling was, as they say in my neck of the woods, giving her one. A measure of Hessling's character is his reply: “Mein moralisches Empfinden verbietet mir, ein Mädchen zu heiraten, das mir seine Reinheit nicht mit in die Ehe bringt.” (“My moral sense forbids me marrying a girl who cannot bring purity to marriage.”)

The German is, in fact, even more damning because it conveys far more than the English translation. (It is ironic that English is always lauded as a versatile language and German relegated to some kind of minor league in such matters, when, in fact, English can be horribly vague and ambiguous – useful, of course, if like a diplomat you want to be vague and ambiguous – whereas because you can express yourself so precisely in German, that you have the means to convey subtlety extemely well.)

Thus my translation, just one of many possible translations. of course, doesn’t at all convey the sheer self-serving hypocrisy of the man, and I think it is legitimate to claim that any other translation - because there would be severtal different way of traslating that short passage - would do no better.

For example, in English we wouldn’t really say ‘my moral sense forbids me’, but, more probably, ‘my moral sense doesn’t allow me’ or 'my moral code doesn't allow me'. And moralisches Empfinden - particularly that word Empfinden - additionally conveys the man’s pomposity. Empfindlich in German means 'sensitive', so Empfinden can mean 'sensitivity'. But any Englishman who, in all seriousness, referred to his own 'moral sensitivity' would be thrown out of the room as a pompous prat and might never again be taken seriously.

Yet, although Hessling's use of the phrase does mark him as being pompous, it does not mark him as being excessively pompous, and many another German man or woman could use the phrase quite easily without inviting ridicule.

The German version - das mir seine Reinheit nicht mit in die Ehe bringt - also stresses that the girl can’t bring him her purity (i.e. virginity), indicating that he would be at the centre of any marriage he made and that his bride is something subsidiary. None of this is adequately conveyed in English, at least not in my translation, though I suggest again that any English translation which did stress that element would sound quite stilted.

Incidentally, the very title of the novel - Der Untertan - sums up just how much is lost in translation. There is no English word of phrase which can adequately convey what Heinrich Mann intended to convey by calling his novel Der Untertan. Several titles of English translations I have come across - Man Of Straw, The Patrioteer and The Loyal Subject - don't even come close to the putdown undoubtedly intended by Mann, although having to come up with a title for a novel in translation must be a perennial problem for publishers.

In German, Der Untertan is laugh-out-loud funny, and when I was reading it, I was forever wondering just how a particularly funny passage I had just read had been translated into English and whether the humour had survived. So quite often, I left the flat and walked a quarter of a mile up the Fulham Road to a Pan bookshop, where I would again haul out the English translation of the novel I had tracked down and look up the particular passage. (The translation I found was called Man Of Straw, and there are several other translations with different titles.)

Each time I found that, in English, what was bitingly funny in German was as distressingly flat as a pancake. In fact, the whole novel is not at all very funny in the English translation and is probably regarded by many as just another worthy German tome.

Additionally, there are other passages in the novel which demand an understanding of German culture and her people’s lifestyle before they can be comprehended. For example, at point Mann writes ‘und am Abend spielte er Schubert’, which is, in context, very funny indeed (trust me), but in English – ‘and that night he played Schubert’ – is close to being meaningless.

After all that, I am at a loss as to how to conclude this entry. I suppose the only honest thing to do is to sound a thoroughly bathetic note and observe (archly) that the propensity for comprehensive misunderstanding between these two great, related but separate European languages - languages related by blood and love, but separated by the contingencies of two diverse cultures - is curiously threatening, and thus the gulf between our great nations is larger than we think. Or something like that. Say it in a German accent. It’s the kind of vacuous observation Hessling might well have made and then patted himself on the back for having such cute and intelligent insight. But, believe me, the Germans are simply not the humourless Teutons of popular English mythology.

Some autumn pictures from a small part of North Cornwall, all taken between 2.30 and 3.30pm today, Saturday, October 9, 2010

I was chatting to a friend via my Facebook page (and exactly why I got one, I don't know. My sister, something of low-level geek, insisted I start one, but to be honest, my mentality and the Facebook mentality are poles apart). I mentioned that I had to walk down the road to see my stepmother as I do every day when I am home. She — my friend, not my stepmother — lives in the U.S., but loves Cornwall, and she asked me to take some pictures of the autumn leaves.So I have. And here they are, in no particular order. None is as it was taken because I use a cheap digital camera, a Fujifilm Finepix E900. It does me just fine, although the lens will be nothing to write home about, and much can be done these days with digital manipulation. (It is also a reminder of how skilled photographers were before the 'digital revolution'. I put it in quote marks because I am now several months over 60 and that is the kind of thing we are supposed to do.) However, given that most pictures now appear online (with a 72 dpi resolution), a good lens is pretty redundant. And if they appear in print, they are so manipulated as to make the original file, however good or bad it is irrelevant.
I have played around with each pic, just for the hell off it. I have adjusted 'temperature', 'exposure', colour saturation, contrast, brightness, and whatever else I could. They don't look too bad on my laptop screen, but uploaded they are nothing special. But what the hell (a comment which ensures, if nothing else does, that I shall never be 'an artist'.)
Underneath each picture is a brief explanation. (That was written several hours ago. Naturally, each explanation is anything but brief.)

This is a view from the gate leading into one of my brother-in-law's fields, taken leaning on the gate. I took it just yards from my front door on my way to my stepmother's. The field is empty because (I think) it is in its fallow year. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer, although he has now cut back on the number of cattle he keeps because he and his wife also run farm holidays for families with young children. Below is another picture taken from the same spot of a cat which lives next door. I don't know the cat's name. This, and the pic of an abandoned van at the end, are the two pictures I like best.


Next are two rather similar pictures of the arbour opposite The Hollow, where my stepmother lives at the moment. I have included both because they were manipulated in slightly different ways and are thus rather different pictures. The first:


and the second:


There is no accounting for technology, and these two pics (and, to a certain extent, the first two) are rather flatter than I should like, but after several days of some glorious afternoon sunshine, today was dull. One reason why I began manipulating the pictures was to try to get a little life into them. I didn't always succeed. The above two, for example, don't, to my eye, look half as good in this blog as they do on my laptop, on which they are also bigger.

My stepmother's passion in life — and although the word 'passion' is usually horribly overused these days, I shall use it despite that because in her case it is true — was gardening. Then she suffered a stroke and for the past three-and-half-years has been confined to her armchair. Until then, she was a very active, very independent woman. She owned two dogs and these she took for two walks very day whatever the weather. Then she suffered her stroke. And she has not complained once. Not once. She misses her garden and gardening but is determined to make the most of her situation. At some expense — and despite what you might think reading this and looking at the pictures, she is not especially wealthy — she employs a gardener twice a month to keep the gardens in shape, but the truth is he can not do a lot. When, in a practical moment, I suggested a few weeks ago that the bottom garden, the garden belonging to The Hollow, might be abandoned and given over to folk who might like to have an allotment, I was given short shrift. My stepmother is a very generous woman, especially in spirit, but the gardens were her life and, and she said, she could not bear the idea that they might become allotments. In this particular case the word 'passion' is not just anther trendy term. For more than 30 years she did give her life to transforming it. She even got into the Yellow Book, which will mean nothing to non-gardeners (such as me), but gardeners will understand.

Both she and my father worked for the BBC, and that is where they met, and she retired early at the age of 46 when my father retired at 60. Her parents were both Irish, but she was born and brought up in Bodmin where her father ran the mental hospital. With a small legacy, she bought Rose Cottage in the early Seventies, which she and my father then extended. The cottage was small and had almost no land. But just outside the living room was a rough old piece of land which she bought — for far too much — from the diary farmer who lived and worked opposite. This she then laboriously, but very successfully, cultivated into a very handsome garden. This the following pictures are of aspects of that garden.


and

Then there is this image, in monochrome (the posh word for B&W) of more or less the same view as the first urn. Incidentally, one of the 'manipulations I used was a fearure available on Mac's iPhoto either to sharpen or unsharpen and image. Several of these pics have been unsharpened to try to make them look like some of the images you get in coffee table magazine no one ever reads - Yorkshire Life, Estate & Title, Cornwall & And The Cornish etc, bought, displayed but never, ever read.


Here's a picture of the urn in the first image taken from the other side, with Rose Cottage in the background.

On the other side of the cottage is the washhouse, the coal 'cellar' and outside loo (and shower, though no one ever used it) and, up a flight of steps, the garage which is next to the vegetable garden. Here are the steps with, in the background, some rather lovely autumnal leaves showering over the garage.


My stepmother was lucky enough to come into ownership of the two cottages next to her's. One, Middle Cottage, she bought jointly with my brother, and the other, The Hollow, where she lives at the moment, was bought by her sister which she left to my stepmother when she died. For many years these two cottages were let out as holiday cottages (and, it has to be said, at ridiculously low prices as my stepmother is one of the few people I know who sincerely and honestly doesn't give a stuff about money — she let out the cottages for holidaymakers for, as she would put it, the fun. More importantly with the two cottages came more garden which she was able to transform utterly. I can't remember what the garden for Middle Cottage looked like, but this is what she made of it.


This next picture is included only because I like it. It is of a scene just outside the back door of The Hollow. On the left is the 'wood shed'. In the winter that is filled with logs.


All three cottages — Rose Cottage, Middle Cottage and The Hollow — are one building and, I should think, about around 200 years old. The Hollow underwent 'conversion' in the Fifties and the inside was hideous. When my stepmother's sister bought it, it was restored to something a little more in character. Its garden, the largest of all three cottage gardens was a wilderness. And in the full knowledge that the word 'literally' is also horribly overused and abused, I shall use it to say it was literally a wasteland: full of six foot high bracken, nettles and whatever else finds its way into a wilderness in North Cornwall if it remains unattended. You have to know that because what my stepmother did with it over the years is quite astounding. This picture (below) is a rather poor picture and doesn't really do the garden justice. But it is the only one I took and it might give you some idea of her achievement.


The cottages are about 200 years old, perhaps older, perhaps not quite as old, but Guy's House dates from the late 16th-century. When I first saw it, it was a tumbledown granite wreck, but my father and my stepmother renovated it so that downstairs is a small shower and lavatory, and a 'wine cellar', and upstairs is a study/library/guest bedroom. For most of his life, my father was 'writing his book', and I'm pleased to say he finished it (almost. It was - is - a history if the Germans and the IRA and how, along the lines of my enemy's enemy is my friend, the Germans, both in the Great War and in World War II, tried to woo the IRA as allies. It never really came off). However, within just a year or two of Guy's House being renovated, my father died of cancer, so it was never really used. It could be, but when and by whom, who knows.
At the far end of Guy's House is shady area where you can watch the sun set while eating or just enjoying a drink. Many is the time I have had one too many gin and tonics sitting there.


Given the build-up I have submitted, this picture dooesn't do the spot justice. For one thing, you can't see the shaded area, but at least it gives you an idea of the view to be enjoyed while you'revgetting slaughtered on gin.
Here are the final two pictures. The first is also of Rose Cottage from the lane leading down to The Hollow from the road. I call it 'The Blue Gate', but you might like to call it 'The Green Gate'. I shan't object.

Then, on the way home, I spotted this fine example of a scene of rustic life in post-modern, not to say post-ironic, Britain. Actually, I spotted it on my way to my stempmother's but took the picture on the way back. On the way there, I didn't think it would be much of a picture. On the way home, I thought otherwise. Pictured is an abandoned truck in Jeff Hollister's field. Jeff Hollister is the son of Jim Hollister, the dairy farmer from whom my stepmother bought the unused, unwanted and derelict piece of scrubland slanting down from the road from which she created her first garden.

I say the van is 'abandoned', but truthfully I don't know for sure whether it is or not. It has been there for quite a few years now, but might at some point be resurrected. It is, after atll, a T reg vehicle which would make it no more than 12 years old and thus still of some use to a local farmer. Perhaps Jeff will sell it. Perhaps he won't. Who knows? Who cares? Does Jeff? I really cannot tell you.

I add this image because I should like to provide a counterbalance to the other images of choccy-box Britain to show that it is not all sweetness and light down here in the shires. You think you city folk are the only kind who suffer from abandoned vehicles? But being the thoughtful sort, I have, of course, tried to make sure that my sobering image is still presented tastefully. It is intended to salve one's conscience without unduly upsetting one's sensibilities. It is, if you like, a Liberal Democratic kind of picture, the pictorial equivalent of reminding the family just before we enjoy our rich Christmas lunch that we should be mindful of our great good fortune and that we should not - we must not! - forget the millions living in less salubrious corners of the world who go hungry every night and probably don't even have democracy. Right then, now that's out of the way, tuck in!

Dedicated to Kate who misses Cornwall.

A plea to all visitors

... and I won't call you 'readers' because I have no idea whether you stay or skim a few lines, tell yourself it's awful and fuck off sharpish. If I am honest, I have, for one reason or another, read several blogs, both on this Google site and elsewhere, and - oh, dear, should I really admit it? - none has done anything for me. Those by younger bloggers - those I have so far read - are just inconsequential bollocks, so personal as to be unintelligible, and the other were about areas in which I have no interest.
Who do we write for? Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I write to be read. I don't write for myself. Years ago when I kept a diary, from around 1981 to 1995, handwritten in hardback A4 ledgers, I consciously wrote for 'a reader'. I can't imagine anyone will ever read those, and they will most probably be thrown out with the rest of my stuff, when either of my children or perhaps a grandchild clears out 'all that rubbish'.
But that isn't the point I was making: the point is that the diaries - and this blog - were not and is not written for me.

A recent visitor
Why would it be? They are written for you. I am, after all, a hack (and I use the term in its proudest sense - yes, there is one) although all I have got out of writing so far is a few pleasant buckshee holidays. (I am not a writer or a reporter on the paper I work for but a sub-editor, copy editor in North America.)
So my request: using the new-found 'stats' feature, I now know where visitors - suprisingly more than I ever thought - are from. And I know they have used other blog directing sites and international versions of the ubiquitous Google. But> Another recent visitor
I don't know why they arrived here, and I should like to, and I don't know what they think of what I write, and I should like to. So, if you are not exactly violently opposed to the idea, would you, my reader, consider leaving just a small comment explaining where you live, who you are and just how and why you arrived here?
You could, of course, always tell me to fuck off and mind my own business (one of the undoubted benefits of living in the Free World - try saying that in Russia), but I'd rather you didn't.
PS The pictures, as we say in the trade, are of two bona fide visitors - don't think I'm trying to butter you up. Perish the thought.

Statistics of dubious usefulness, The Sun, Kelvin McKenzie and a question: just how thick are Sun readers?

Ever since I have been writing this blog, I’ve wondered whether anyone actually bloody reads it. Well, it seems some might be doing so. I say ‘might’ because it’s quite possible that someone who follows a link, say ‘newspapers’, and then comes across this blog might take one look at the rather sparse and sober layout and some of the blog entry titles and say to themselves ‘most definitely not for me, squire’ and fuck off sharpish. But at least we can now know how many visit this site, even though it is impossible to tell how long they lingered. This info is courtesy of a ‘stats’ feature which I never knew was available until about ten minutes ago. It works in much the same way as the ‘stats’ feature on YouTube (another fiefdom in the burgeoning Google empire) so I suppose it uses much the same code.
The stats you are given are, as is the way with most stats, reasonably obscure and in some ways downright pointless. For example , you can be told how many visits you have had in certain timeframes – last week, last month etc – and where those visitors came from. So I know that I have had visitors from Brazil, Russia, Romania and Israel as well as the U.S. and Britain.
As for the rather less useful info we get (or, to put it another way, the rather more useless info) the stats also record what browser the visitor was using, whether he was using a machine with a Windows, Mac or Linux OS or an iPod, iPad or whatever. Fascinating, if that sort of thing fascinates you.
This all started with me wondering whether I get any visitors at all or whether I am simply blethering in the dark (so to speak). After finding out about ‘Blogspot stats’, I now realise I really don’t care.
Which reminds me, in a very obscure way, of an anecdote about Kelvin McKenzie (pictured), a former editor of the Sun who is quite well-known in these islands. One day, Kelvin was walking past the newsdesk when the phone rang and he picked it up to answer it. On the other end was some reader who began complaining about something or other. Kelvin very quickly got fed up with having his ear bent and curtly informed the reader:
‘Right, you’re banned from reading the Sun,’ and put the phone down.
He carried on talking to the news editor for a few minutes when the same phone rang again. He picked it up. It was the wife of the reader he had just spoken to. She told him her husband had just informed her that he had been ‘banned from reading the Sun’. Did that mean, she asked Kelvin (certainly plaintively and perhaps even tearfully) that she was banned too?
Sad, but true.

Bullshit, blogs and backgammon: a truly heartwarming account of one man's love and how his soul is redeemed by honesty.

When anyone sets up a blog on this site, they are asked to list their ‘interests’. Well, I don’t know how honest others are when they jot down their lists, but I most certainly had half an eye on listing ‘interests’ which might possibly do something to attract the attention of others and persuade them to visit this blog. So although I can honestly say that I do have an interest in each subject and topic listed in my profile, it would be dishonest to claim that it is an active interest. The list is: people, sex, gossip, politics, music, writing, painting, backgammon, philosophy, art, money, greed, altruism, the past, the present, the future, love, hate, hacks, fleet street, newspaper, hypocrisy and — which on reflection is surely the giveaway — anything else you can think of. Take the first on the list, ‘people’: the first thing you can say about anyone who sincerely believes they are interested in ‘people’ is that if they are being sincere, they are most certainly under 22. And if they are not under 22 — though being sincere — they suffer from a severe case of retarded adolescence. ‘Being
interested in people’ is one of those things we think we should be interested in when, in our salad days, we are rather prone to a kind of socialistic idealism, not to say a jejune tendency to kid ourselves. (NB I have just looked up the dictionary meaning of ‘jejune’ to make sure I was using it correctly, and according to the definition given by whatever dictionary Apple Macs use, the sentence ‘jejune tendency to kid ourselves’ is somewhere in the no man’s land of between being tautologous and almost meaningless. But fuck it: it sounds good, so it stands. Any complaints must be written out in longhand an an A4 sheet of paper, which you must then screw into a tight ball and shove up your arse.)
Also on the list are ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’. These again, if someone were to suggest that they are seriously his or her ‘interest’ would tell you more about that person, specifically that they are in danger of being pretty self-regarding and most definitely pretentious. Ditto ‘altruism’. As for ‘art’, ‘painting’, ‘music’, ‘politics’ etc, these, when they appear in my list, are pretty much in bullshit territory in that, although I do occasionally go to art galleries, listen to music, watch and listen to the news etc, to claim I take an active interest in them, as is implied by listing them in my profile, is bollocks. I am on firmer ground with ‘Fleet Street’, ‘hacks’, ‘newspapers’ and their eternal companion ‘hypocrisy’. In these I do take an active interest, although being a fully signed up and very active member of Her Majesty's Press, it isn't difficult.
This morning I added another keyword to my list of ‘interests’ and it is quite possibly the only honest ‘interest’ in the list: backgammon. I learnt to play backgammon about 25 years ago (and writing that last bit made me realise just how bloody old I’m getting: it seems like yesterday). Exactly when and by whom I really can’t remember. ‘Backgammon’ was for me, before I learnt to play, something of a pastime for rakes and generally the louche. I knew there were backgammon tournaments and I knew many people played and play it for, often quite high, stakes. I also assumed it was a rather difficult game to learn and play. Well, I was wrong. It is very easy indeed to learn, though like many good games it is not at all easy to be a good player. Because what move you can make depend on the roll of dice, it is a mixture of chance and luck (and I’ve both won and lost games dramatically merely on the throw of the dice). But it is fair to say that a good and experienced player will, over time, always beat a worse player. Each match consist of three, five or seven games, or, I suppose, however many you want it to consist of. Then you can, of course, go on to play as many matches as you like. And, as I say, in the long run, the better player will always come out top.
After I learnt to play, I have played against everyone and anyone with enthusiasm. When I bought a secondhand PC with Windows XP as the OS, I was pleased to discover that it allowed me to play backgammon at any time of the day or night for however long I wanted to. Most recently I have bought a laptop which has Windows 7 as its OS (which has the same facility as XP) and I have played at least an hour of backgammon every day ever since. In fact, being able to do so was one of the main reasons I bought that laptop. (I didn’t and don’t need another laptop as I had, at the time I bought it, two Mac iBooks and a Mac Powerbook. I have since sold one of the iBooks).
I am no good at chess and have hardly played it, and although I occasionally play card games, particularly Irish Snap with my two children, I can’t say I do so regularly. But there is something about backgammon I truly love. The essence of the game is simplicity, yet it is not simplistic and is most certainly no a simple game.
So there you have it: an interest listed on my list of interests which really is an ‘interest’ and not blog bullshit.

Huey Long, a socialist in a country which loathes socialists. He was gunned down at 42, though there's no suggestion the two are somehow linked

Over these past few days, I have watched, virtually back to back, both film versions of All The Kings Men. The first, written and directed by Robert Rossen in 1949 and starring Broderick Crawford, is usually described as ‘a masterpiece’. Well, it’s certainly very good and very entertaining but, in my view, it isn’t ‘a masterpiece’. Incidentally, believe it or not before Crawford was cast, John Wayne was approached to portray the demagogic Louisiana governor Willie Stark. What Wayne would have made of the role, I really don’t know. For one thing it required acting and as far as I’m concerned acting wasn’t in Wayne’s repertoire of abilities.

The second version, written and directed by Stephen Zaillian, was released in 2006 and starred Sean Penn (below)
and Jude Law. This was not hailed as a masterpiece, but, instead, universally panned by the critics. My view is again contrary. It has its faults, but I don’t at all think it was as bad as it was made out to be. Yes, Sean Penn has a tendency to chew the carpet, but he does it so well, that I would prefer to see him chewing the carpet any day. (Other great roles he has played were the coke-up, paranoid shyster lawyer in Carlito’s Way and the rapist/murderer in Dead Man Walking.) The second is not a remake of the first, as is so often – and inexplicably – claimed, and in many ways they are different films. The


1949 version with Broderick Crawford (above) concentrates more on the rise and increasing corruption of Willie Stark, whereas the later film seems to concentrate more on the Jack Burden character, the idealist turned cynic beholden to the bottle who does Stark’s dirty work for him. Jude Law – this is again my view – does a good job. (A lot of people seem to have it in for Law. I don’t know why.) Both fall down in that motivation is never fully explored and analysed.

Why did Stark become such a monster, especially in the first film? And exactly why was Jack Burden (in both films) so disillusioned that nothing seems to have been too dirty for him? What was the back story of Anne and Adam Stanton? They are more ciphers than characters.

Huey Long on the stump
Robert Penn Warren, who wrote the original novel All The Kings Men, admitted he had based the character of Willie Stark on Huey P Long, the populist politician and governor, like Stark, was gunned down in the Lousiana senate building. I had previously heard of Long as one scavenges information here and their and files it away and seemed to remember he was a wrong ’un, a man in league with the Devil who was nothing better than a crook. But out of interest, and in preparation for watching the two film versions, I looked up a potted bio of the man. And boy was I wrong.

Granted that there can be many versions of a man’s life and granted almost all of us are apt to believe what we want to believe, the worst that can be said of Huey Long – the worst – was that he behaved like a great many of his fellow politicians and gave jobs to his supporters. And what cannot be doubted was that Long did a lot of good, a lot more than many other politicians. But Long came unstuck because he was, in all but name, a socialist, a man who believed that those who had a great deal should share their great deal with those who had next to nothing and even nothing. And if there is one thing the U.S. apparently hates above all things, it is ‘a socialist’. Long taxed big business in order to pay for the hospitals, schools, roads and bridges he built and he was outspoken in his criticism of FDR’s reforms. He did not think they went far enough.

Long was an exceptionally gifted man (and should not be mistaken with the quasi crook created by Robert Penn Warren). He completed his three-year law course in eight months and was called to the bar. He had ambitions to the presidency and he most certainly had the drive to achieve it. He would undoubtedly have had the support of the nation’s underdog on whose behalf he worked. But he was assassinated in 1935 a few months after he had announced his candidacy for the presidency in the following year’s election. He was still only 42.

The story is that in order to discredit a political opponent, he had two of the man’s daughters dismissed from their teaching jobs and threatened to spread a rumour, already in circulation, that the man’s family had ‘coffee blood’. His opponent’s son-in-law was upset by the suggestion that his wife had Afro-American blood, went to the state capital and shot Long. At first Long’s wounds from a bullet in the abdomen and in the spine did not seem fatal. But his doctors had missed a bullet he had taken in one of his kidneys, and by the time this was discovered, Long was too weak to survive more surgery.

There is also a theory that the son-in-law didn't have a gun at the time of the shooting. Long was waiting in the senate building waiting to see whether a certain bill would be passed and he was approached by the son-on-law, a Dr Carl Weiss, about some matter or other. Long is said to have brushed Weiss off, saying he was too busy to talk. After the third brush-off by Long, Weiss is said to have got angry and punched Long on the mouth. Immediately, his bodyguards opened fire on Weiss and several bullets are said to have ricoched off marble pillars and struck Long. In order to cover-up the death, the gun Weiss kept in his car was planted on his corpse. He was shot 60 times.

As you can imagine there are several conspiracy theories. In the months leading up to his death, Long often alleged that there were plots to kill him. He and his family were the victims of a drive-by shooting at his New Orleans home, although no one was hurt. It was as a result of his fears of being assassinated that Long surrounded himself with bodyguards.

The whackiest conspiracy theory I have found on the net is by an anti-semitic group called Jew Watch (no link provided - if you're really interested, you can find it for yourself. I don't want to put traffic the way of those cruds). The website alleges that Dr Carl Jacob Weiss - they spell it Karl Jakob Weiss - was a Mossad agent paid to kill Long. The major flaw in that particular piece of nonsense is that Mossad wasn't founded until at least 13 years later when the state of Israel was established. That detail notwithstanding, it otherwise makes perfect sense and I'm surprised it has been adopted in all official histories of Lousianna, Huey Long and political assassinations.

Adolf Busch, an honest musician, and Tully Potter's biography of the man

To room VG10 of the School of Oriental and African Studies in Vernon Sq., London, for the launch party for Tully Potter’s rather massive two-volume biography of the German violinist Adolf Busch (pictured). I was invited because for the
past 20 years, ever since I have known Tully, in fact, I have been helping him out by translating German letters, memoirs, concert reviews and any other pieces he came across and which he wanted to use. Why the School of Oriental and African Studies? I don’t know, but the publisher, Toccata Press, is small and perhaps it was all it could afford.
I was rather looking forward to the evening, especially as a few short pieces were being played which Busch had written, but in the event, I wasn’t able to get away from work before 7.30 – I only worked a single shift and should have left at 6, but clock-watching is frowned upon and casuals such as myself had better believe it – and then I had to get from Kensington to Kings Cross where the excessively convoluted layout of the St Pancras/Kings Cross Tube station delayed me even further. Then I had to find the place, so I didn’t arrive until almost 8.30, by which time the music-making was over. I consoled myself with several handfuls of sushi (which I thought were based on fish, but these weren’t) and several glasses of 2010 Chilean Sauvignon Cabernet, which tasted like alcoholic fruit juice. The cardinal rule of gatherings such as book launches and exhibition openings (of which I attended a few while I was a reporter on The Journal in Newcastle in the late Seventies and also wrote its weekly art column – you didn’t know that, did you?) is to stick to the red wine. It might be bloody awful, it usually is bloody awful, but it is never as bad as the white wine served on these occasions, which is always extremely acidic and which will always give you very bad heartburn.
There were a good few men there with paunches, many of them rather younger than me. It is always quite odd to see a youngish man with a paunch, but otherwise no other signs of obesity. I assume that they were all musicians and that growing a paunch is a concomitant hazard of spending your professional life sitting down. That explanation makes sense, anyway.
‘Martin’, the owner of Toccata Press, was spectacularly fat, dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt and waddled. I said hello to Tully but didn’t linger speaking to him, because he had to sign copies of his two books – two volumes, remember – and there were plenty of others who wanted to talk to him. If you are interested, you can find out more about Tully’s book here.

Hague gay? Who gives a toss. I just hope he knows what he is doing

It’s a truism in journalism that it isn’t the scandal which does the damage, but the subsequent cover-up. So it might be with William Hague, Her Majesty’s Secretary and all things Foreign, and, as far as I’m concerned, an all-round good egg. And because I like and respect the guy, I am rather disappointed by the ham-fisted way he appears to be handling the situation.
I was first told that he was gay — or rather was thought to be gay — several years ago by a colleague and friend who — I hope I get this straight (absolutely no silly joke intended there) — heard it from a friend of the ex-boyfriend of his sister, or the brother of the ex-girlfriend of his brother, or something or other (doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it, but there you go, that’s the problem with unsubstantiated rumours which might not have a leg to stand on). Apparently, whoever it was knew him well and said so. (I repeat my aside about tittle-tattle not inspiring much confidence.) At the time, I thought it was nonsense. But then all this business came up and I heard rather more credible info, including the comment, made after Hague released his PA statement, ‘well, that’s a hell of a hostage to fortune. What will he do when one of his ex-lovers comes forward?’
I gather that there is 100 certainty that Hague is gay, that he was at the centre of a Tory gay mafia while at Oxford (note to foreign readers: while a student of one of the colleges there, not just visiting the town) and that Ffion is his beard (and if that is the case, I like to believe — remember, I am a fan of Hague’s and like to think he is an honourable man — that she was squared from the off and wasn’t just cynically used). So I come back to be original point: it is not the ‘scandal’, but the refutations and rebuttals which cause the damage.
Furthermore, the true irony is that for the first time for many, many years in Britian, no one gives a fuck whether or not a politician is gay, although what does upset Joe Public is apparent hypocrisy, i.e. someone attacking gays is subsequently revealed himself to be gay. I cannot say so for certain, but being gay is really not regarded as even being remarkable these days, except, again ironically, by the worthy left-of-centre broadsheets who
insist on publishing tacky Pink Lists of the ‘most influential’ and richest gays to demonstrate how liberal, broadminded and tolerant they are. (My picture is of a generic influential and wealthy gay, quite possibly the editor of the Guardian dressed for work.) From Peter Mandelson, Nick Brown and Chris Bryant on the Left to Alan Duncan and Nick Herbert on the Right — and not forgetting David Laws — from Graham Norton and John Barrowman to Lord Browne (once of BP) and Andrew Pierce of the Mail, all are now mainstream and their sexuality is the least interesting thing about them. There was a ‘scandal’ of a sort over Lord Browne, but it didn’t centre on his homosexuality but that he told a lie to hide that fact he got to know his then partner through a gay dating website. Then there are the legions of gays who seem to be able to lead perfectly open lives these days with no one giving a fuck. And thank God for that.
So if what I have heard is right, what on earth is Hague playing at? Good Lord, if the worst comes to the worst and the News of the Screws carries loads of ‘reports’ from all sorts of men about ‘spending nights of passion with William’, he is going to look like a complete pillock. One explanation could be that he has been closeted for so long that he calculates coming out would do more damage than staying in; or that, as was the case with David Laws, his family don’t know and he would prefer they didn’t.
I cannot say exactly why I like Hague, although it is partly his wit which, as far as I know, is unmatched in the Commons, and his intelligence, but I do like him and wish him well. And I hope for his sake that this whole business is concluded without damage. Today the papers carry reports that he has been soured with the political scene and might jack it all in, reports which, as far as I’m concerned, are simply exercises in journalistic kite-flying; and that he is independently wealthy and doesn’t need the money (or something like that), but I think that is unlikely. The world first came across Hague when as a 16-year-old and with a full head of hair he made a speech at a Conservative Party conference. I think that politics is in his DNA and is Foreign Secretary. I really cannot see him packing it in. So, I wish him the best. And I do so hope I am wrong. Use your loaf, William.

Want a successful career (and not just on a newspaper)? Just say Yes

This picture (below) appears on page 27 of the Daily Mail on Monday, August 30, 2010. When a similar picture was lying around the picture desk here at the Mail several years ago, I was tempted to stick it on one of the columns here in the office and add a particular caption. Wisely, I thought better of it. Although many individuals at the Mail have a very good sense of humour, there comes a point where that sense of humour tends to fail, and given the caption I planned to add to the picture, such a failure was a racing certainty. (In fact, more than a racing certainty, because many such ‘certainties’ in racing are nothing of the kind.)

When the picture below appeared this morning, the opportunity is proving to great to miss given that I can publish it here in my blog where the chances of discovery and a consequent sense of humour failure in Northcliffe House are pretty low.



'Yes, Paul'
My caption will be rather obscure to many, but my sense of self-preservation obliges me not to elucidate, even though few, if any, read this blog. For greater impact, the reader would be best advised to substitute the name of his or her boss.

I should add that I hold a minority view of the chap in question. Those higher up the food chain are often subjected by him to frequent and profane invective, whereas I am of such sheer insignificance here in Northcliffe House that such bollockings blow right over my head. On such occasions it is reassuring to belong to the rank and file.

Understandably, senior and junior execs are inclined to be less than charitable about their boss, and no one can be quite as bitchy as male journalist. On the other hand, I think this guy, who is a tall chap, is essentiallty rather shy, and very private who does not like the limelight. Furthermore, I suspect that he is a very good and loyal friend to those he regards as his true friends. And from where I sit - i.e. as someone not exactly in the loop - there doesn't seem to be any side to him, which, for a newspaperman is nigh-on unique. If, on occasion, he stamps his foot - once quite literally - to get things as he wants, it has to be said that his insistence on getting things spot on in the way he thinks is spot on most certainly plays a significant role in the Mail's undoubted success.)

There’s one born every minute (more or less)

I’ve just been reading that ‘a star with two Saturn-sized planets’ has been spotted by the US planet-hunting’ Kepler telescope and that scientists are seeing whether there might be a third ‘earth-sized’ planet also in orbit. (The Kepler telescope, incidentally, was named after the Southend-on-Sea turf accountant (‘bookie’) Jeremy Kepler, who put up most of the money for its development, and not, as you might have thought Johannes Kepler, the 16th-century German mathematician and astronomer, an account of whose life you will find here.)
Fair enough. As a lad now in his late 90s who was brought up on Dan Dare and the Mekons, the mere mention of extraterrestial life is enough to get my pulse racing. But it also reminds me of several oddities which always occur when we discuss ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’. But before I launch into tonight’s diatribe (or this morning’s if, like Olly, you live in New Zealand), I must confess that I find it inconceivable that life, in some form or another, has not also evolved elsewhere in the universe.
This afternoon, on Radio 4’s Material World in a piece about black holes and magnetic stars, I heard that there are something like 100 million stars in every galaxy (with most stars having about it several planets) and that there are several billion galaxies in the universe. Well, do the maths and tell me that ‘life on Earth is unique’. If it is, then in 1966 I was the only teenage alive who thought that existence was shit and unfair, and that all I wanted to do with my life was to make fun of it so that it retreated into its cave red-faced, defeated and full of shame. Such was the scorn of my anger.
When there is talk of ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’ — and future generations will fervently hope that whatever ‘life’ they do come across is ‘intelligent’, because there will otherwise be precious little opportunity to engage in trade with ‘unintelligent’ algae or what an Alpha Censorius takes the place of algae — we always seem to make the same assumptions. On the one hand that we assume that when extraterrestrials do finally spot Earth and decide it might be worth a stopover, they will always ‘come in peace’ (‘We come in peace’). And if peace is rather further from their minds than is laid down by some UN charter or other, that they are always unbelievably ferocious bastards who merely want to rape our women, steal our cattle and then destroy what’s left of Earth’s ‘civilisation’.
Now why do why think either must be the case? Why do we think that the ‘aliens’, the ‘extraterrestrials’, who make it to Earth — and who have presumably survived the vicious interrogation all aliens are subjected to by US Immigration when they arrive — are the sole representatives of their civilisations? When, finally, the US and, a little later, Russia, land four or five of their chaps on Mars (and sorry, girls, but you know as well as I do that it will initially be chaps), did they really consult Sri Lank and Venezuela and Canada and Georgia and Mongolia and Namibia before launch as to what the best approach might be if and when ‘natives’ are encountered? And what exactly will the US’s/Russia’s Mars visitors do if and when they are regarded by that planet’s suspicious natives as invaders and treated accordingly? Will they loudly proclaim in one voice and with renewed vigour repeat the declaration that ‘we come in peace’? Or will they shoot back when they are attacked? For if it is the US rather than Russia which first gets to set its foot on alien soil and which, subsequently, is the first to be made aware that it is not quite as welcome as it thought it might be, will it treat the indigenous populations of Mars and the other distant planets it visits as it treated the indigenous population if America when it first set its dainty foot on the sands of Cape Cod? Most recent reckonings estimate and accept that more than two million Native Americans succumbed as the ‘white man’ who ‘came in peace’ chose to impose his authority on ‘the savage’ in the 200 years which followed his arrival.
And why do we assume that ‘alien’ civilisations aren’t equally as riven by rivalries and paralysed by bureaucracies as the Earth’s ‘civilisation’ is? Why do we assume that the spacecraft which has recently arrived on Earth from Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II (and if it has arrived on British soil, preferably not on a weekend) speaks with one voice for the peoples of Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II? And if the ‘civilisation’ which lands its fleet of UFOs at Cape Cod at some point in the future does speak with one voice, it would be safe to assume that that one voice speaks uniquely for an authoritarian system which will brook no dissent. And thus it is unlikely ‘to come in peace’. Earlier today I read an account of the problem India and China face over deciding on the line of their mutual frontier (although they both might not regard it as a ‘problem’ but, at best, more as an ‘irritation’.) That rather puts our future concerns of how to treat visiting aliens into perspective. Will, it be: ‘OK, your Zorgon bastards, you can have Solihull and Kings Heath, but that’s it, OK, understand? You step one foot — one foot! — north of Mosley and it’s curtains. Savvy?’ I think it was something like that the Patuxet told the Pilgrim Fathers in 1622. Something like that. For all the good it did them.
Alien invasion? Bring it on! We’ll show the bastards.