Wars of nerves

Although he’s no longer the Laureate Andrew Motion has marked Remembrance Day this year with a very public poem, ‘An Equal Voice‘, which used ‘found lines’ about shellshock and post traumatic stress to bring this particular (and distinctively distressing) experience to mind, shared to some degree by all survivors of war. As he wrote in the introduction:

This is a “found” poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There’s a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers.

As he acknowledges he has also drawn on Ben Shephard’s history of military psychiatry, A War of Nerves, and the title is taken from a quote from Shephard’s book:

“We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences.”

Oddly, Shephard’s response was that the poem was plagiarism, which surprised me, coming from the author of a fine (and undeservedly out of print) book. It’s not. But perhaps the history of the objet trouvé hasn’t yet collided with the history of the military.

The whole poem is technically quite interesting – 6 fourteen line stanzas. I’ve reproduced the first one here and recommend reading the whole thing, which was published last Saturday in the Guardian Review and builds, memorably, towards a conclusion.

From An Equal Voice

War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.

Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust

reports, blueprints one day and the next –

with the help of a broken-down motor car

and a few gallons of petrol – marching men

with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,

horses straining and plunging at the guns,

little clay-pits opening beneath each step,

and piles of bloody clothes and leggings

outside the canvas door of a field hospital.

At the end of the week there is no telling

whether you spent Tuesday going over

the specifications for a possible laundry

or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.

The picture is from Canadian Content, and shows soldiers cooking a Xmas goose at the front in 1914. It is used with thanks.

The English murder

In The Decline of the English Murder, written 60 years ago, George Orwell reflected on how murder reflected the times. The celebrated pre-war murders typically featured respectable men who had got themselves into unrespectable affairs with women, often of a lower social class, who were done away with by poison. The wartime murders which prompted the essay, in contrast, were done by an American Army deserter and his British girlfriend, who seemed to kill their victims – almost existentially – because they could. The randomness of war re-enacted as a celebrated crime.

The thought is prompted by Patrick Forbes’ documentary The Force, shown on Channel 4 this week, about Hampshire Police investigating a body found burned beyond recognition in the village of Dummer. This murder also reflected its times. The victim was Polish, the murderer Bangladeshi, who had worked together in an Ibis hotel in London and had started having an affair. Her mobile phone had been used to delay suspicions about her disappearance; his by the police to piece together his movements around the time of the murder. Fragments of the story were pieced together from CCTV footage, most compellingly when the police traced the film which showed him dragging the suitcase with the woman’s body in it to his car. But the breakthrough came from traditional policing, knocking on doors and handing out photos. And the motive was also traditional: he killed her out of jealousy. As a by the way, some of the housing conditions seen or reported during the film were quite shocking.

I need to declare an interest; I work with Patrick Forbes’ wife, and she had reminded me the programme was on. But – in contrast to most of  the factual programming on British television – the film used the people and the pictures to tell the story. Even the rhythm of the events – with only a small amount of programme-maker’s artifice – provided the cliff-hangers. And what a relief all of that was; no celebrity presenter, no urgent voice-over, and none of those horrible post-ad break intros which now seem compulsory at Channel 4, in which you’re told, again, what the programme is about, which have the unintended aesthetic effect of making every programme seem the same (“I’m Kevin McCloud and I’m on the trail of the 18th century aristocrats who transformed the way Britain thinks about design”. Please).

In other words, it was a proper documentary. It’s repeated late on Friday and there are two more to come, on the next two Tuesdays. [Update: There's a reflective review in The New Statesman.]

The picture at the top of the post is courtesy of Channel 4.

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 turmoil in Britain at the time. But it 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 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.

The dust on the shoes

I had thought that there was nothing new to say – or at least nothing new to say worth saying – about the attack on the World Trade Centre towers in 2001. The symbolism of the event and the scale of the response – emotional as well as political – had wrung out all of the meaning. But it seems that I was wrong. There’s a short reflection in last Saturday’s Guardian Review by the Irish-born, New York-resident writer Colum McCann on the pair of shoes which his father wore on the day of the attack, when he was fortunate enough to escape from the building. He then walked to McCann’s apartment on 71st Street:

My daughter, Isabella, jumped into his arms. She recoiled from the hug and asked if he was burning and, when he told her that it was just the smell of the smoke on his clothes from the buildings that had collapsed, she said, no, no, that he must be burning from the inside out.

My father-in-law immediately swapped his clothes. He couldn’t stand the thought of the suit, the shirt, the tie, what they held, what they carried. He threw the clothes away, but left his shoes by our door. They stood there for weeks, until we finally figured that we had kept them there precisely because they had carried him out and away to safety. They were, in whatever small way, a beacon of hope.

It is still a difficult thing, these days, to pull out the shoes. I still think that every touch of them loses a little more dust. I am paralysed by the notion of what the dust might contain – a resume, an eyelash, a concrete girder, plasterboard, a briefcase, a pummelled earring, another man’s shoe. They sit in a cupboard behind me, over my left shoulder, a responsibility to the past.

McCann has just published a well-reviewed novel about New York and the World Trade Center, Let The Great World Spin. He also writes about the difficulty of finding meaning in the events of that September when, in its aftermath, everything seemed charged with meaning. One way in was through the astonishing 1974 tightrope walk by Philippe Petit, even though it had become a familiar event, through novel, plays, and even documentary film:

But stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself.

The picture is from Ellen Sanders’ Crackpot Chronicles, and is used with thanks.

‘Why we fight’

Perhaps to demonstrate that politicians do have a use after all, one of Alan Johnson’s final decisions before being ghosted from the Department of Health to the Home Office was to instruct Islington Primary Health Trust to ‘reappraise’ its decision to sell off to developers Berthold Lubetkin’s Grade 1 listed Finsbury Health Centre.

There’s quite a lot online about the Health Centre, which was opened in 1938. Lubetkin was a Russian emigre who became one of the leading Modernist architects in the UK. His views on the function of architecture were radical; nothing was too good for ordinary people. Architecture should be an engine of social progress. This chimed with Finsbury Council, one of the most left-wing in the country, grappling with some of the greatest poverty and worst public health conditions.

But what’s interesting about the building was how quickly it became iconic – adopted by the Ministry of Information as a symbol of what Britain was fighting for in the second world war, as seen in the propaganda poster by Abram Games at the top of the post. Close study suggests that it was designed to make visual the Beveridge Report, with its attack on the ‘five giants’ of illness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want, seen in the shadows behind the new health centre.  (The more traditional approach to visualising Britain – and certainly the one that would dominate now – is shown below.)

I was thinking about this partly because I was reading the biography of the film-maker Emeric Pressburger, whose war-time films meant endless conflict with the Ministry of Information. In early 1940, a memo was issued on the subject of the areas which were appropriate for propaganda, and there were three of these:

1. What Britain is fighting for
2. How Britain fights
3. The need for scarifices if the fight is to be won.

Without going into detail, the first heading was about ‘British Life and Character’, and ‘British Ideas and Institutions’. I’m only guessing. of course, that there was a similar note written to inform the wartime art and poster effort, although it seems likely. But with hindsight, it seems extraordinary that a radical public building by a pioneer of the modernist moverment in one of the poorest parts of the counctry should, in effect, be enshrined as an idea or institution worth fighting for within five years of opening its doors. Churchill hated the poster (not the first time he’d disliked Information Ministry propaganda) and it was printed but never displayed; but the fact that it was commissioned at all is a clue to post-war politics. Finsbury’s approach to health is seen now as a model for the national health service; Lubetkin, Games, and the Ministry of Information commissioner of the poster perhaps understood better than Churchill what they were fighting for.

‘And you can’t speak of Tiananmen’

The 20th anniversary reports of the massacres in Tiananmen Square – complete with a Chinese digital media blackout – reminded me of ‘Tiananmen’, the fine poem by the writer and sometime foresign correspondent James Fenton, written in haste and in anger within days of the killings.

Tiananmen by James Fenton

Tianamen Is broad and clean

And you can’t tell

Where the dead have been

And you can’t tell

What happened then

And you can’t speak

Of Tiananmen.

You must not speak.

You must not think.

You must not dip

Your brush in ink.

You must not say

What happened then,

What happened there.

What happened there In Tiananmen.

The cruel men

Are old and deaf

Ready to kill

But short of breath

And they will die

Like other men

And they’ll lie in state In Tiananmen.

They lie in state.

They lie in style.

Another lie’s

Thrown on the pile,

Thrown on the pile

By the cruel men

To cleanse the blood From Tiananmen.

Truth is a secret.

Keep it dark.

Keep it dark.

In our heart of hearts.

Keep it dark

Till you know when

Truth may return To Tiananmen.

Tiananmen Is broad and clean

And you can’t tell

Where the dead have been

And you can’t tell

When they’ll come again.

They’ll come again

To Tiananmen.

Hong Kong, 15 June 1989 -

I hope his publishers will forgive my reproducing it here: Fenton’s collection Out of Danger, from which this comes, or his Selected Poems. are worth some of anyone’s time and money. Normally poems written at such speed are unmemorable after the moment has passed. I was struck by reports of people reading this at a commemoration this week in the UK. News that stayed news, to borrow Ezra Pound’s aphorism.

Brecht, Weill, Hitler, and Bernie Madoff

I’ve always liked the work of Ute Lemper, the German singer who’s probably best known for her interpretations of Kurt Weill’s work, although she has performed songs by many others as well, including Nick Cave and Elvis Costello (on her excellent Punishing Kiss record)..

In a recent interview she explained how she first got interested in the Brecht-Weill songbook in the late ’70s as a way of filling the silence of her parent’s generation about the war, and the Holocaust:

“I didn’t sense that anyone felt any grief.” She pauses. “Grief!” she says again, this time with deep emphasis. “Sadness, madness, anger. How could that happen? How could such organised crime have happened, this imperial Caesar who felt he could take over the world, and the crime of the killing of all the Jewish people. I was numbed with pain – I couldn’t breathe for years.” Brecht-Weill filled both the cultural vacuum and the political silence. Politically, Brecht’s poetry supplied the anger and indignation that she craved. She devoured the history of how Weill, as a German Jew, became a target of the Nazis and was forced to leave the country in March 1933. Five years later, his compositions were paraded in the Düsseldorf exhibition of “degenerate music”.

The same silence, it is sometimes said, was also filled by the violence of Baader-Meinhof’s Red Army Fraction. But this isn’t just history. As she points out in the interview the financial crisis has brought Brecht and Weill’s songs right up to date.

The brutal, corrupt world that Brecht and Weill captured in Weimar Germany is alive and well, she insists, and every bit as relevant today as it was then.”Who is Mack the Knife?” she asks with a knowing look. “He’s that man who did it so courageously, so gutsily. The one now sipping champagne in prison. Bernie Madoff.”

Her version of mack the Knife – from you tube, of course – is at the top of this post. (There’s also a more theatrical version in English here – part of the Elizabeth Taylor concert where her singing is followed, a little bizarrely, by a stage appearance by Michael Jackson.)

Standing up for the ‘commonwealth’

The death of Ernest Millington, who won a historic war-time by-election in 1945 at Chelmsford for the radical Common Wealth party, produced a fine story about his arrival in the House of Commons. Although he’d come from an ordinary – and poor – family, and had been sacked from at least one pre-war job for his left-wing campaigning, he’d risen through the ranks of the RAF, becoming a Wing Commander. There’s a fine anecdote in Ray Roebuck’s obituary which captures Millington’s spirit and the social turbulence of the time:

He first arrived at the Commons with his newly awarded Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon inexpertly self-sewn on to his uniform. A Conservative MP, who was a squadron leader in the RAF police, approached. “You are improperly dressed,” he told Millington. “If you are talking to me as an RAF officer,” Millington replied, “take your hand out of your pocket and address a senior officer as ‘Sir’. If you are addressing me as a fellow MP, mind your own business and bugger off.” He did.

Obituaries such as this pour light on parts of our history which have been obscured. Having re-read some of the 17th century English Revolution history recently, I’m also struck by the link between the wartime Common Wealth party and the use of language about ‘Common Treasury’ and ‘Common Storehouse’ by the 17th century egalitarian ‘Digger’, Gerard Winstanley.

Technique as resistance

Spare a thought for Aleksandr Rodchenko, who spent a decade or more as a leading light in the Constructivist school of painting. But he then decided that being a constructivist and a painter was incompatible; art needed to have a material base. He turned instead to photography, design,montage, even advertising. But what to do with all of those paintings? According to the current exhibition at the Tate:

When I look at the numbers of paintings I have painted, I sometimes wonder what I shall do with them. It would be a shame to burn them, there is over ten years of work in them. But they are as useless as a church. They serve no purpose whatsoever. [1927, Novyi LEF No. 6]

There are parallels between Rodchenko and Shostakovich. Both were leading innovators in the post-revolutionary period; both fell foul of Stalin’s ‘Soviet Realism’ period, and had to make amends for their previous ‘formalism’ during the ’30s; but both escaped the camps and outlived the Great Leader.

What’s also interesting is that although at first sight their more ‘realist-friendly’ work appears to be a retraction, it is not exactly as it seems. In Shostakovich’s case the 5th Symphony was a tuneful contrast to the more challenging 4th (criticised in Pravda, apparently on Stalin’s direct authority). Rodchenko, for his part, ended up photographing the forced labourers building the White Sea canal.

Both have been criticised for this (it’s customary for Rodchenko to be accused of ‘propaganda’, usually by people who haven’t lived through having friends and relatives sent o camps or killed in well-organised state terror). In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross explains that the 5th is full of musical clues: quotations from and references to the 4th which would pass by the untrained listener, references to a previous setting of a Pushkin poem about the legacy of the artist, and “an apparent allusion to Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudunov, the ultimate pageant of Russian suffering.”

For his part, Rodchenko’s canal pictures, at least to this viewer, do emphasise scale,  but they are also framed to emphasise distance and indicate power relationships within the shot. At the very least, they make the picture ambiguous, as in the example below. Both men used their mastery of technique as a form of resistance, inscribing clues – for those who could read them – for later generations.

The photograph of the Rodchenko painting, ‘Suprematist Composition’, 1918, at the top of this post comes from Rodchenko pages on Art Experts Inc. There’s a huge Shostakovich resource here.

Horses and bridges

I was cycling through Hyde Park this week and was halted as a couple of Army horses were escorted out of Knightsbridge Barracks, manuring the road as they went.

For some reason this brought to mind Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minster during and immediately after the second world war, before Czechoslovakia became communist. It was suggested that the country might become a bridge between the communist east of Europe and the social democratic west.

It may have gained (or lost) something in translation, but Masaryk’s response was that:

“The trouble with being a bridge is that horses gallop across and crap all over you.”