Thomas Paine as Che Guevara

There’s still time to catch the last few performances of A New World at the Globe Theatre in London, Trevor Griffiths’ adaptation for stage of his unmade screenplay about the life of one of Britain’s greatest radicals and campaigners, Thomas Paine. Commissioning the stage version to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Paine’s death in 1809 (in obscurity) was a smart piece of scheduling by the Globe.

Griffiths is a fine radical playwright, and this is a ‘big’ play, covering a sweep of history – in three hours – which takes in the American and French revolutions and the tumoil in Britain at the time. But it also doesn’t forget the personal as well as the political. And the Globe is a good setting for such a play, with the groundlings’ space acting as an extension of the stage when necessary. This post isn’t a review – I’ll leave that to Michael Billington and Stuart Weir – but for me the play conjured brilliantly the fragility of the events of the revolutions as they unfolded, and the uncertainties of the participants who lived through them from day to day.

It also succeeded in a way that I imagine that Griffiths would wish for; there’s enough of Paine’s own writing – from Common Sense and the Rights of Man – in it to make me realise that I should have read more of it than I have. And enough, too, to make his present relative obscurity puzzling; as if his long-standing career as a member of the awkward squad had carried over into his historical legacy.

‘My country is the world’

As it happens, Verso has just published a new edition of Paine’s writings in their Revolutions series, with a fine introduction by the historian Peter Linebaugh (review via Verso’s blog). I’m just going to share a few notes from that introduction here.

Paine is a puzzle. He left school at 13, and was 37 when he went to the United States, and there was apparently little in his background – save, perhaps, the petition he wrote to Parliament on behalf of fellow exciseman in support of higher wages – to suggest that he would, over the next twenty years, become the most influential political writer of his time. The clues are there, though, in his engagement with local learned societies, his spell as a teacher, his study of science and engineering.

By the time the two parts of the Rights of Man had been published, he was both widely read and widely feared, partly because it had been priced cheaply (Part I cost only 3/-) and sold widely. The language was sharp and also uplifting: “All the monarchical governments are military. War is their trade, plunder and revenue their objects”, contrasted with “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”. As Peter Linebaugh writes, Part II was dangerous to the British government because of “its forthright translation of equality in economic terms, and its overall tone of democratic confidence”.

‘Where liberty is not’

Linebaugh has a deep knowledge of the 18th century, and he situates Paine’s work at a moment before the commons had been closed off by landowners, when the American revolution had created new ideas of the possible. He makes the analogy to Guevara, and it seems a fair one; a revolutionary who fought (and wrote) in one revolution, was centrally involved in the politics of a second one (he was a deputy to the French National Convention), and was pursued by a government deeply fearful of a third (the full powers of the British state – spies, hired mobs, and lawsuits – were turned on him).

His work was also influential in the United Irishmen movement in the decade in Ireland before Wolfe Tone’s failed rebellion; 10,000 copies of the Rights of Man sold in the country. A British military commander wrote that “The north is certainly inoculated by Paine, who persuades every man to think himself a legislator”.

Paine seems, now, impossibly modern, with his opposition to the death penalty and slavery, and his scepticism about organised religion. He spoke for the rights of the native American nations. His judgment on contemporary events appears astute; he refused to vote for the execution of Louis XVI, because of the harm it would do to the revolutionary cause; he thought Washington, after the revolution, unprincipled (and Washington, in turn, left Paine to languish in a French cell); and called Napoleon a charlatan. He influenced independence struggles in India and Indonesia.

His books – and a biography – were banned from American public libraries during in 1949, as part of HUAC’s mission (oh, irony!) to defend “the form of government defended by the Constitution”. His history is entwined with that of American Presidents; Monroe freed him from jail in Paris, Jefferson invited Paine back to the United States. Paine was, it was said, Lincoln’s favourite writer, and also seems to be a favourite of Obama’s, who quoted him without crediting him in his inauguration speech. In short, the exchange which is quoted by Linebaugh at the start of his introduction, between Paine and his sponsor Benjamin Franklin seems apposite:

‘”Where liberty is, there is my country”, declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine”‘.

The picture at the top of this post shows John Light as Thomas Paine, and Daniel Anthony as Will, in the Globe’s production of A New World.

Cutting novels

James Buchan had a review in Saturday’s Guardian of Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin, which I mentioned last week. Although he’s broadly sympathetic, he thinks it too long, and suggests a useful rule of thumb for editing novels which is worth repeating here:

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. McCann’s first chapter reads like Time magazine at its most solemn and sentimental. (“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey.”) The story proper, as in so many novels, begins some way into the second chapter.

I liked his combination of ‘parade’, ‘effects’, and ‘disgust’. He also has another rule of thumb about the role of vintage cars in fiction: don’t do it.

Two of his characters, downtown junkie artists, are given a 1927 Pontiac Landau, which is forever parked across the narrative. Classic cars should be avoided in fiction.

The rest of the review can be read here.

The picture, of Chris Locke’s ’scissor spiders’, can be found at the 2dayblog.

Highway 61: Dylan’s blues record

You never quite know what you’re going to get with the American music writer Greil Marcus, although I’m a fan: Mystery Train re-shaped the way I thought about American music when I was younger, and Lipstick Traces is a work of genius,  one of the great books of the 20th century. Some of the rest is more patchy, although in all of his writing there are virtuoso passages of improvisation which are worth the cover price.

So it proves with Like A Rolling Stone, which uses the song as a way into the moment when Dylan re-invented himself as a performer, and also, Marcus suggests, when American culture was also on the turn. For me the improvisation is a section – only a few pages – which links the song and the record, Highway 61 Revisited, to the American blues tradition. Other writers (such as Michael Gray) have demonstrated Dylan’s deep knowledge of country blues, and when I went back to listen to the record I realised, I think for the first time, that the very obvious blues-inflected songs on there (Tombstone Blues, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, for example), aren’t easy fillers but are about setting the tone. The guitarist Martin Simpson has made this connection brilliantly in his ‘medley’ which links the country blues “Highway 61″ and “Highway 61 Revisited“, and which is worth nine minutes of anyone’s time over on You Tube. And of course Greil Marcus takes us on a lively detour along this iconic American road, the ‘Blues Highway‘.

Some aspects of the “Rolling Stone” session are worn smooth with repetition. Al Kooper sometimes resists questions about how at 21 he inveigled himself into playing keyboards on it (well, when the facts become legend…). It does seem clear from Marcus’ appendix that there was really only one good version in the fifteen or so takes, and on another day the song could easily have become one of those well-bootlegged ‘interesting failures’ of Dylan’s career.

There are other curiosities too. Tom Wilson, the producer, was fired by CBS after the Rolling Stone session for reasons which remain unclear, but may have been to do with colour, and his place taken for the rest of the recording by Bob Johnston. Johnston seems to had a fair deal of propriety, certainly by the standards of the music industry; when the first sleeves came back Wilson was not credited as the producer on Like A Rolling Stone, and Johnston sent the sleeves back so this could be corrected (his name is still there on the latest CDs). Is the sound different on the other  songs? Marcus thinks so – Johnston pursued a more ‘ensemble’ sound, whereas Wilson looked for clarity between the instruments, and going back to the record afresh it is possible to imagine that Johnston made the tonne of the record ‘dirtier’ – in fact, more bluesy.

Some of the best books on bike racing

I’m never sure about posts which are basically lists, but I have been mulling this one over for a few months now, and there will never be a better moment than this year’s Tour de France ‘Grand Depart’ in Monaco to share them. So here it is:

Best introduction to the Tour de France: Inside the Peloton by Graeme Fife.  Fife – a prolific cycling writer – manages to combine both the sense of the sport and how it works, as well as the history of the race and most of the ‘grands’, the riders who have dominated it.

Best inside account by a professional: Paul Kimmage’s book A Rough Ride. Kimmage, now a sports journalist, was a successful amateur who never won a race as a professional. His book, published in 1990, was the first to break ranks on the sport’s drugs culture in the ’80s, and he was ostracised for most of the ’90s. But the book does more than this; it gives a feel for the life of the journeyman pro (in the same way, say as Eamonn Dunphy’s Only A Game did for football in the ’70s).

Best Insight Into being a team domestique: Domestiques are the team riders who can’t win for themselves, but ride for their leaders, preventing breakaways, chasing them down, keeping the pace high in the mountains, and so on. A Significant Other by Matt Rendell (based on Victor de la Pena’s diaries of the 2003 Tour) catches this better than any other. There’s a splendidly geeky section on the physics of the peloton, and a fine chapter in which de la Pena explains his team role in detail on one particular stage.

Best fictional account: Tim Krabbe’s The Rider – a novella about an amateur race, seen from the perspective of one of the riders. Almost existential.

Best book written by an insider about a pro team: A tie here, and both are about professional British cycling teams, about fifteen years apart. In Wide Eyed and Legless, Jeff Connor (a former fell-running champion-turned-journalist) is sent to ride the Tour stages ahead of the race and also report on the ill-fated ANC-Halfords team, under-prepared and under-financed, as it falls apart during the race. Team on the Run is written by John Deering, the press guy of the Linda McCartney team, funded by the vegetarian food company, and by Paul, who comes out of the story well. There are some highs – an unexpected win in the Giro d’Italia, for example – before the money goes astray.

Best book about racing as an amateur - or maybe just the best book about racing: The Escape Artist by Matt Seaton, a wonderful account of the slightly obsessive nature of the amateur rider. It sets the tone with a well-judged description of a tricky but exhilarating part of a favourite training run, and also of his first experience of riding fixed wheel at the Herne Hill velodrome (which ends calamitously). This is about cycling as a way of life – which comes up hard, later, against his wife’s illness and early death. I’d say it’s the best of all of these books.

Other cycling posts:
Reaching the heights, touching the void

In praise of Mark Cavendish

Cycling and painting

Doping, cycling and the Olympics

Sporting records, limits and technology

Reaching the heights, touching the void

Although I love professional cycling, despite its flaws, I have delayed reading Matt Rendell’s biography of the Italian climber Marco Pantani, who won the Tour de France and the Giro in 1998, and died of a massive cocaine overdose in a hotel room six years later, dogged by (well-founded) drugs scandals. The book got fine reviews, and Rendell knows the sport well (he is (co) author of one of the best books about being a team domestique). The reason I put off reading it was that I knew it would depress me.

The best way to summarise this is through a couple of lines in the final chapter:

Looking back, Marco’s successes, like any number of world records, gold medals, and winning sequences in recent sporting history have a phantom quality. … They weren’t events at all, but phantasmagorical experiences with no clearly definable reality that existed chiefly in the emotions they caused in millions of indivdual minds. The emotion most associated with Marco is euphoria, yet we know now that it was triggered by the poisons that flowed through his veins and made his flamboyant style possible.

It’s worth exploring this further. One of the most exciting sights in cycling is a climber attacking the field and gaining the minutes he needs to win – and Pantani’s stage win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998, when he attacked on a climb in atrocious conditions, descended recklessly, then climbed again, to make enough time on Ullrich to seal his Tour victory – was one of the most exciting days of racing in my lifetime.

But in a (literally) forensic analysis, Rendell demonstrates that Pantani had been blood doping through the use of EPO almost from the start of his professional career. At the same time, he kicks away one of the cycling fans’ supports. Almost all of the successful cyclists in the 1990s used EPO (Bjarne Riis, tour winner in 1996, has admitted it; Ullrich hasn’t but the evidence is against him, there are still questions over Armstrong’s win in 1999). So the fan’s defence is that EPO use must  have levelled the playing field – while quietly disregarding the talented but non-using Charly Mottet, who never finished the Tour higher than fourth. Rendell suggests that athletes respond differently to EPO, and that Pantani’s success might just suggest that his body was better attuned to the drug.

So far, this ia familiar story about 90s cycling – or even modern professional sport. But there are two other stories in Rendell’s narrative as well. The first is about the nature of cycling in Pantani’s native region of Emilia-Romagna, with its strong Communist traditions. The first chapter of the book places cycling, and Pantani, deep in their social milieu.

The second is perhaps more revealing. Rendell suggests that Pantani’s sporting success disguised a pattern of mental illness that might have otherwise been recognised more clearly – and which seemed to be inherent in his growing cocaine abuse after 1999. More: this might have been part of his make-up as a sportsman which enabled him to take the risks on descents which contributed to some of his victories, and also to some of his crashes. The other half of this, of course, is that some of the experts who tried to help Pantani identified this problem – but the cyclist’s fame and wealth, and some of his advisors who lived inside this bubble and benefited from both, meant that it was always impossible to address it.

The initial newspaper article, which led to the book, can be found here.

Aberystwyth noir

The notion of Raymond Chandler’s mean Los Angeles streets being translated to Aberystwyth seems far-fetched, but Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth is not the small seaside town that some of us know.

Instead, it is more like a part of a Wales from an alternative history, where the druids are a mafia-like organisation, where religion – extreme chapel – still holds sway, where women still wear stovepipe hats, and where Wales lost control of Patagonia in a disastrous colonial war in the mid-1960s. The plots tick over relentlessly, and the private eye, Louie Knight – like other PIs, from Philip Marlowe  to Harry Moseby – is usually several steps behind the action. The body count is high and the writing often hilarious.

Instead of magical realism, this is more like magical noir. The clue may lie in the author’s biography, which may be true: Pryce, brought up in Shrewsbury and Aberystwyth, has lived and worked abroad since the early 1990s, and currently lives in Bangkok. His Wales is the parts distilled through a haze of memory.

The fourth in the series, Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth, connects Adolf Eichmann to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, without leaving the town – or at least the immediate area. The first, Aberystwyth Mon Amour, is probably the most ‘Welsh’ of the books, and culminates in a parody of the dambusters’ raid over a Welsh reservoir. And I promise that knowing this about the plot will not be a spoiler.

Scribner and The Sun Also Rises

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback review column in the Saturday edition of the Guardian is always worth reading, for his knowledge, his love of the craft of writing, and also his generosity towards the authors he reviews. He also has the gift of making you interested, at least for the duration, in books you might not even pick up in a bookshop, let alone read. This week’s column – on Gary Dexter’s Why Not Catch-21? is a good example, and typical of Lezard’s style.

It also contains a great anecdote about The Sun Also Rises:

He has a fondness, and a gift, for the right kind of anecdote: such as the list of unsuitable words from The Sun Also Rises (“shit fuck bitch piss”) that the publisher Max Perkins wrote down. “Unfortunately, the heading on the pad was ‘Things to do today’. Charles Scribner came into Perkins’s office, saw the pad, and said to him: ‘You must be exhausted.’” Dexter, always conscientious in his search for the facts, adds a footnote telling a variant anecdote: Scribner says, “If you need reminding to do those things you’re in a worse state than I thought.”

The second version, by the way, seems more complete, a better ’story’; and has probably been improved in the retelling.

Harold Wilson vs Tony Blair

Francis Beckett contrasts Harold Wilson with Tony Blair in a review in The Guardian: not to Blair’s advantage:

The children of the 60s and those of the 70s thought New Jerusalem was around the corner, its arrival hindered only by the conservatism of Harold Wilson’s Labour governments. They did not realise that they were living in New Jerusalem and that their generation, which benefited from this dazzling array of freedoms, would, within 20 years, destroy them. Nor did they realise – for they had never heard of Tony Blair – how lucky they were to have Wilson to hate. Wilson courageously kept Britain out of Vietnam, founded the Open University and made such cautious moves towards greater social equality as were allowed by the difficult economic circumstances.

Proud of having conquered their inherited inhibitions, the 60s and 70s generations thought, in their innocence and foolishness, that there was little else to conquer. Their parents had battled for healthcare, for education, for full employment and economic security. These battles having apparently been won, the young fought for, and won, the right to wear their hair long and to enjoy sex. These were the battles that the young Blair fought and won at a stifling old-fashioned public school, Fettes, at the end of the 60s. He rejected the statism of the Attlee settlement. It is precisely because Blair is an authentic child of the 60s and 70s that he threw away. Labour’s chance to change the Thatcher settlement of Britain’s affairs. He had no quarrel with it. The children of that time saw themselves as pioneers of a new world – freer, fairer and infinitely more fun. They were wrong.

The review is also good on the unions and the 70s:

[Alwyn] Turner shows how all the signs of their demise were evident in the 70s. Doom-laden books of the period included Anthony Burgess’s novella 1985, published in 1978, which predicted a dictatorship by the unions. Turner’s account of the Grunwick strike portrays the sad reality: that both the unions and their enemies thought the unions had power, but when unions had to protect workers against really bad employers who fired them for joining a union, they failed.

How civil rights are eroded…

Ronan Bennett reviews Patrick Maguire’s book My Father’s Watch in the Guardian. Maguire was 13 when he was arrested (in 1974) for his ‘part’ in the mythical bomb-making factory that police alleged – completely erroneously, and largely without evidence – had been run from his house. Much later the convictions of all involved were found to be unsafe. So why did it happen? Bennett’s argument resonates down the years:

It happened because of prejudice – against the Irish community specifically, against working-class Irish in particular; brutality – Irish prisoners had been threatened with guns and physical violence; they had been kicked, slapped, punched and verbally abused; stupidity – on the part of the police, the judiciary and the legal profession; compliant media – or worse: some papers actively fomented hatred of the accused; panic – there were bombings so politicians had to do something, now; science – which was said at trial to prove conclusively that the accused had handled explosives and which subsequently was rubbished as the work of incompetents and buffoons; and finally because of insufficient safeguards on the treatment of suspects, who were denied contact with lawyers and interrogated for extended periods. Is this ringing any bells, Mr Brown? Ms Smith?