Though John Updike was 76 when he passed away two weeks ago, it still feels as if he died young. His last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), was the sequel to one written a quarter-century ago, and was largely concerned with the pathos of growing old, but the book was fecund with what can only be described as promise. Its mistakes and frequent lapses from good taste or artistic control had much more in common with the errors of youth than the complacencies of age; it offered the earlier novel’s surprises, the delicate phrasing, the wanton charisma of Alex and Sukie and their coven, for the reader to savour. We can only feel robbed of whatever might have come next.

It might have been, for instance, the definitive account of Barack Obama’s America. In his last published interview with The Observer, Updike enthusiastically welcomed Obama’s election, although when it emerged that he had himself been nominated by the then Democrat candidate as a favourite writer, he remarked, “I’d have thought Barack would have been reading Hegel, not fiction!”

Updike’s curiosity was insatiable, undiminished by caution or fear or the suspicion that the next generation was intent on robbing his own of its dignity and achievements. In the moving “A Letter to My Grandsons” from his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), he wrote that “America is still waiting to be made” and tentatively advanced the view that “an ideal color blind society flickers at the forward edge of the sluggishly evolving one”.

He possessed in abundance—abundance being another of his great qualities—a generosity that for his fellow Great American Novelists became increasingly cramped by old age. While Saul Bellow had adopted a tone of jovial misanthropy from Herzog onwards and Norman Mailer spent his last decade entertaining the sort of artistic eccentricities that hadn’t been seen since the days of Madame Blavatsky, Updike got his crankiness in early. His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was a dystopian romance that traced the plight of the elderly in a futuristic America where rationalism and sociology were swiftly supplanting a previous generation’s religious faith. In the late 1950s, America was changing; prosperity and material comfort were gradually being extended to all, but the emerging counter culture heralded a new spirit of restlessness.

Born in 1932, to a lower middle-class family in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Hoyer Updike was a child of the Great Depression. Yet he slipped into his career as a staff writer for the New Yorker and his domestic role as a husband and father with an ease that we might find disquieting now. It was only when Updike weighed the dissatisfaction of his contemporaries against the bulk of his own instinctive religious sympathies that he produced fiction of uncommon richness and complexity. In 1958, he glanced at the cover of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and, disturbed by the book’s invitation to sever all ties, decided to investigate the consequences of cutting loose.

The result was Rabbit, Run (1960), the first in a series of four novels and one novella documenting the life and legacy of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the permanent delinquent who would spend most of his life settling for second best. Rabbit’s story became America’s story, a fact made ludicrously apparent in Rabbit is Rich (1981), when our corpulent hero shambles about at the head of an Independence Day parade, dressed as Uncle Sam but resembling a profane hybrid of Falstaff and Colonel Sanders.

Throughout Updike’s career, the great struggles convulsing American society corresponded to the moral conflicts experienced by his characters. Eventually he discovered (in art, if not in life) a compromise between America’s subversive energy and social propriety in the deviant consolations of adultery, finding within the perimeters of a discreetly opened marriage a fervent source of playfulness and risk. Foxy Whitman from Couples (1968) was among the fictional beneficiaries of this attitude: “Adultery lit her from within, like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent.” This passage tells you less about Updike’s beliefs than about his major asset: his prose. One metaphor won’t quite do so he soon runs into another, which raises the experience one notch higher. The sentence smoulders as it expands and eventually falters with delight. But then it is meant to: after all, we are reading about an emotional conflagration.

Perhaps Updike was too readily identifiable by his prose style. But if few writers invited parody as often as he did, there were even fewer capable of doing the job. Bemoaning the fashion for what he termed “vow-of-poverty prose”, Martin Amis hailed Updike as the “king in his counting house”, who happily rejoiced in the luxury of his wealth, minting new phrases and images for the world around him. Those sentences of his, finely turned and supple, often distinguished by an unexpected modifier or construction, stand as his ultimate legacy and make his entire body of work, from the Rabbit books all the way down to the slightest essay or poem, indispensible.

When Nicholson Baker catalogued his reading of Updike in the exquisite homage, U and I, he confessed that he rarely read his hero’s novels to the end. Baker casually implies that one could almost read any paragraph or sentence at random and get the point. Yet, for Updike, style did not entirely supersede the other elements of successful fiction. His novels suggested new possibilities that connected the brash formal experiments of the early century to the democratic humanism of Bellow, Mailer and Bernard Malamud. Inspired by the examples of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Green, he set about proving the elasticity of high style and its ability to mould itself around different points of view. In this way, Updike honoured the neglected opulence of ordinary experience. He scarcely could have assayed the importance of observation and interest in our lives, had he not devoted such attention to the sentence and the singular detail.

Updike’s flaws were the failings of an achieved perfection, both in life and in art. The problem with being a self forever is that experience tends to flatten out, and it is perhaps fitting that there were no degrees of intensity to his writing: somebody so grateful for existence could repay the debt only by lavishing the same rapt attention upon the part as on the whole; and as a result his works were almost entirely composed in a spirit of unshaken serenity.

On becoming familiar with his novels and stories, you learn to take beauty for granted, which is a terrible bounty for a reader. He never was convincing when he was dealing with outright cataclysms—nobody can read Towards the End of Time (1998) or The Coup (1978) without wincing at least once—and, despite his honourable commitment to American democracy, the political sphere eluded him completely.

These quirks should alert us to what is perhaps the central component of his contribution. Updike was our great poet of contentment, the post-war writer who understood that, more often than not, anomie, disaffection and depression would eventually be absorbed by happiness. In Self-Consciousness, he admitted that he had rather too determinedly suppressed traces of struggle from his childhood memories. “When many years later, I was recalling some of these happy circumstances in the company of my father, he interrupted me with an exclamation almost agonized; ‘Oh, no, Johnny—we were poor!’”

Nobody is entirely free from sorrow, but for the greater part of humanity, one of life’s many felicitous distractions usually arrests the downs in their precipitous surge. It is this observation that charges Updike’s signature eroticism with such considerable significance and suffuses his account of the Maples’s faltering marriage with vivid solace. Even Rabbit eventually comes to abide by this redemptive rhythm of living, and his gradual recognition of its truth in Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest (1990) are rightfully considered among the loftiest of artistic peaks in the 20th century American novel.

“Every man has bitterness in his chosen thing”, Bellow has one of his characters proclaim in The Adventures of Augie March—but not John Updike, and perhaps not every man. For those of us without religious faith, it might be difficult to accept Updike’s belief in an everlasting self, but we should at least be able to affirm that his body of work is imperishable. This is stating the obvious, but right now the obvious needs stating. After all, the torrent of words has dried up. No more novels or short stories. Not even a little book review for the New Yorker. But if there is an afterlife, surely nobody is better equipped to write us postcards from that permanently undiscovered country. Whatever Paradise might throw at him, his capacious eloquence and omniscient powers of description would be equal to the task.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.

Photograph © Penguin Books Ltd.

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Hillary is history.

After dominating the political landscape for years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun the slow descent to headlines below the fold. The discussions that accompanied her presidential campaign have followed suit. For two years, the persistent gender inequity in US society received top billing—and in rare cases, critical reflection—as Americans engaged with the possibility of a female president. Today, there are still only 17 women in the US Senate, none of whom are women of colour. Women still make 75 cents to the male dollar, and the gender gap may rise in worsening economic conditions. Paid maternity leave is not standard among even the best US employers. But with Clinton gone from the centre stage of American domestic politics, so too is the one woman whose presence alone guaranteed a nationwide discussion of these issues.

Yet Hillary has still made history. Before the problems of gender inequality fade from popular discourse, we need to reconsider what happened to Hillary—and to history—in the past several years. When Barack Obama entered the race, the Democratic primary became a dramatic showdown to nominate either the first African-American or the first woman on a major US party ticket. As the battle between Clinton and Obama unfolded, the question of “who would go first”, a black man or a white woman, emerged as a central paradigm in the election coverage. The question divided feminists, splintered the Democratic Party and influenced voting patterns.

It also motivated deeply simplistic—and equally offensive—identity politics. Take the thinly veiled racism of Bill Clinton’s comparison between Obama’s candidacy and Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, or the suggestion that the late Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an African-American woman and outspoken Clinton supporter, was a traitor to her race. The immense import placed on “going first” in 2008 situated race against gender in a zero-sum political climate, often to the detriment of better judgment.

But rancour over the question of who should “go first”—African-Americans or women—has rich precedent in American history. In the 19th century, the first feminist movement stemmed from the ideas of abolitionism. Indeed, feminist pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met at an anti-slavery convention when they both were refused seats. Despite—or perhaps because of—the ideological parity between feminism and abolitionism, the promise of Reconstruction era progress quickly brought the problem of  “going first” to the fore.

In a decision that would divide their movement, prominent American feminists (including Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth) refused to support the 14th and 15th Amendments on the grounds that suffrage for African-American men should not precede—or proceed without—women’s right to vote. Truth defended her position in a speech at the 1867 American Equal Rights Association Convention, arguing that suffrage for black men would subordinate black women and stall growing support for women’s rights. As she famously explained: “I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.”

While her statements were controversial and her stance remains debatable, Truth recognised that advances in gender equality hinged on the timing of civil rights. The debate over black men’s suffrage derailed the nascent feminist movement. Popular support for women’s suffrage waned. Women would not secure the vote for another 50 years, and “going first” would carry deep meaning for the feminist movement over the next century.

Examining this historical tension over timing can help make sense of the recent US Democratic primary. Sojourner Truth’s sentiments foretold not only the long wait for women’s suffrage, but also the disappointment and anger that Clinton supporters felt at her failure to secure the Democratic nomination.

But focusing on the significance of “going first” also obscures the interdependence of racial and gender equality. Despite moments of sharp discord, the American movements for civil and women’s rights have been intertwined inextricably at least since the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft first drew comparisons between slavery and the coverture laws that gave a woman’s husband full control of her legal rights. In the Antebellum era, American feminists made crucial contributions to the abolition of slavery, and the first American movement for women’s wage equity in the 1920s grew out of the post-Civil War labour movement led by African-Americans. The National Organization for Women was founded on the model of civil rights organisations of the 1960s.

These parallels have not gone unnoticed. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book often credited with igniting the Second Wave feminist movement, was hailed as a “woman’s Emancipation Proclamation” when it was released in 1966. Civil rights leaders from Frederick Douglass to SNCC activists Casey Hayden and Mary King have compared the treatment of women and African-Americans. In short, these two movements have been aligned philosophically, practically and discursively  throughout American history. The notion of  “going first” forces a sharp divide between racial and gender equality, but as history demonstrates—and African-American women illustrate rather obviously—race and gender are not so easily distilled. Each movement owes its victories, to some extent, to the other.

The question, then, is why “who goes first” continues to have relevance in contemporary movements for social equality. The conflict over black men’s suffrage established the import of “going first” in the US, but it also illustrated the debilitating consequences of putting stock in this concept, for it was, in large part, the subsequent schism between feminists that stunted women’s suffrage. So why focus on firsts?

From the start, the American movements for racial and gender equality have been united by the stark contrast between Constitutional guarantees and the realities of unequal life. Within this context, milestones have become a tangible way for these movements to realise and record progress toward the ideal. Milestones are signifiers of change and a powerful form of speech. The movements for civil and women’s rights represent unrealised rights and underrepresented voices in American culture, and it makes sense, then, that being “the first”—which is so often translated into “going first”—becomes symbolic and divisive at key moments in American political history.

Barack Obama knows all of this, which is one of the many reasons he rarely mentioned race in his two-year candidacy. The historic nature of Obama’s presidential bid was self-evident. The milestone did the talking for him.

Obama’s election is a feminist victory. His policies are feminist; a century of feminist activism helped make a black president possible; and, perhaps most importantly, race is a feminist issue. But this election is not a feminist milestone. Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency has passed, and as Secretary of State, she is largely excluded from the domestic policy agenda. The onus to articulate the need for gender equality within the US thus falls on Obama, for without a milestone to speak for them, feminist issues have already begun to fade from the limelight on the American stage.

It still remains unclear whether the Obama Administration will take a strong stance on gender issues. Obama has described himself as a feminist, and he made a point of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in his first days in office. He has appointed women to some of the highest positions in US government, and his wife, Michelle Obama, drew comparisons to Clinton yesterday when she took a public role in presidential policy.

But Obama also regularly emphasises his commitment “post-political” bipartisanship. Such rhetoric  often has anti-feminist implications. Obama made nary a mention of feminist issues in his inaugural address, invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation and quietly cut family planning funding from his stimulus package in response to Republican opposition. These actions may have been the products of political compromise, but if so, that only strengthens the need for Obama to rearticulate his dedication to gender equality.

History shows that women’s progress wanes without a determined and public discussion; actions alone do not suffice. Obama has gone first. But if he is consistent—and explicit—about his policies on gender equality, he can seize upon the opportunity to usher in an era when “who goes first” does not equate with who gets heard. Time will tell if he takes it.

Emma Kaufman is reading for an MSc in Criminology at New College, Oxford. She is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

John Ashbery
Collected Poems (1956-1987)
Library of America, 2008
989 Pages
£26.50
ISBN 978-1598530285

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This past October, the Library of America released John Ashbery’s Collected Poems (1956-1987), making him the first living poet to be “canonised” in the series. It is a fitting honour for a man whose decades-long reign as one of the high priests of the contemporary American poetry scene has always been something of a paradox. Having received nearly every major award for achievement in the humanities, he continues to incite considerable debate as to whether his poems “mean” anything at all.  To read an Ashbery poem with the intent to explicate in the traditional sense is to make a daring, perhaps foolhardy, leap of semantic faith.

Yet, wading through the 989 pages in the Library of America volume—comprising the poet’s first 12 books and 65 uncollected poems—one begins to hear a distinct Ashbery “voice” in one’s head, a not unpleasant experience, as many readers have discovered. It is a voice by turns philosophical, chatty, oracular and buffoonish, like a poetic Frankenstein’s monster animated by Wallace Stevens’s brain, W.H. Auden’s heart, Edward Gorey’s eyes and Daffy Duck’s hormones. Gradually, one becomes accustomed to this voice and to its chosen subjects, some disarmingly familiar and others weird in the extreme.

In these poems, we find mountains, rivers, trees, waves, diagrams, night and the weather alongside convex mirrors, clepsydras, hygrometers, Rumford’s Baking Powder, Van Camp’s Pork and Beans and just about any other imaginable foodstuff, tchotchke, cultural reference or scientific implement. To help orient us within this bizarre world, Mark Ford, the volume’s editor and an Oxford alumnus, has appended a modest critical apparatus and a chronology of the poet’s life.

John Ashbery was born in 1927 and grew up in the farm country of upstate New York, near Lake Ontario. He lived with his grandparents for much of his childhood and developed an early passion for painting, aspiring to be a surrealist painter. But by the time he arrived at Harvard in the late 1940s, he had abandoned his painterly ambitions to focus on poetry, which he began to publish in The Harvard Advocate. As an undergraduate, he met Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, close friends and later collaborators in the so-called “New York School” of poetry, as well as other luminaries like Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, Robert Bly and Richard Wilbur.

Ashbery’s first breakthrough came in 1956 with the publication of his debut volume, Some Trees, selected by W.H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Around this time, he moved to France on a Fulbright grant, and ended up staying there on-and-off for nearly a decade, publishing in 1962 his second and arguably most experimental book, The Tennis Court Oath, and making his living as a translator and art critic. He returned to New York City in 1965 and over the next decade published three more volumes, notably Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and made his reputation. Championed both by influential critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler and by the avant-garde elite, his star has been on the rise unabatedly for the past 30 years. His Selected Poems first appeared in 1985, complemented in 2007 by Notes from the Air, a selection of his last 20 years’ work. He has also published several books of prose.

Ashbery’s craft and stylistics, protean as they are, emerge in the first stanza of the first poem in the Collected Poems, “Two Scenes”:

We see us as we truly behave:
From every corner comes a distinctive offering.
The train comes bearing joy;
The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny.
For long we hadn’t heard so much news, such noise.
The day was warm and pleasant.
“We see you in your hair,
Air resting around the tips of mountains.”

Many of the later Ashberian trademarks appear in this early passage: personal pronouns lacking antecedents, references to weather (“The day was warm and pleasant”), water and rivers (“the water-pilot”), meteoric objects that streak by joyfully and offer some kind of lesson or illumination (“The train comes bearing joy; / the sparks it strikes illuminate the table”), generalised and personified landscape imagery (“Air resting around the tips of mountains”), and free use of abstractions (“Destiny guides the water-pilot”), to name a few salient examples. Most of these elements reappear in astonishing form in one of Ashbery’s finest poems, “Parergon” (meaning “a subordinate or accessory work”) from The Double Dream of Spring (1970). It begins “We are happy in our way of life./ It doesn’t make much sense to others,” and it concludes with a quasi-mystical vision that blazes by then disappears into the night:

As one who moves forward from a dream
The stranger left that house on hastening feet
Leaving behind the woman with the face shaped like an arrowhead,
And all who gazed upon him wondered at
The strange activity around him.
How fast the faces kindled as he passed!
It was a marvel that no one spoke
To stem the river of his passing
Now grown to flood proportions, as on the sunlit mall
Or in the enclosure of some court
He took his pleasure, savage
And mild with the contemplating.
Yet each knew he saw only aspects,
That the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring,
And turned his head away, and so
The lesson eddied far into the night:
Joyful its beams, and in the blackness blacker still,
Though undying joyousness, caught in that trap.

Again, we find unspecified first person pronouns, unusual use of abstractions (“Our entity pivots”), and the shimmering, river-like “lesson,” but to what purpose? As good postmodern readers, we can hold onto and cherish beautiful lines like: “Yet each knew he saw only aspects,/ that the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring” without hoping to fathom their meaning. In his long prose poem “The System,” he writes, “But now to have absorbed the lesson, to have recovered from the shock of not being able to remember it, to again be setting out from the beginning—is this not something good to you?” Ashbery scatters hundreds of similarly portentous yet ambiguous statements or “lessons” throughout his work, like so many bread-crumb trails that hearten us but never really lead us out of the forest of confusion.

Of course, there is a long and distinguished history of “forests of confusion” in the western poetic tradition. We may travel a very long way (650 years!) from Dante’s “dark forest” to Ashbery’s Some Trees, but there has never been an end to writers searching for clearings of understanding within the dense thicket of reality. Meanings swim in and out of our view, while we try to make sense of them as best we can, Ashbery tells us repeatedly.

Having been anointed one of the major voices of our age, Ashbery forces us to consider tradition’s continuity, its past, its present, and its future trajectory. Throughout his career, he has submitted high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture to his artistic whims (collage, pastiche, occasional use of difficult forms like the sestina, the list goes on and on), sometimes with a savage touch, at others with a mild one. He pillages from the classics alongside the best of the Modernist marauders, but he also introduces an unprecedented element of zaniness, married to a penchant for baroque complexity and abundance. This leads to a readerly experience of over-stimulation, disappointed expectations, and unsettledness that is particularly well suited to late 20th and early 21st century audiences, for whom “postmodern” notions of bathos and fragmentation have become commonplace assumptions about life. Ashbery speaks to us by fulfilling our expectation that, to be modern, a poet must be not only difficult but also “incorrigibly plural”, to borrow Louis MacNeice’s phrase.

In “Syringa,” a putative Orpheus and Eurydice poem, he writes: “Its subject/ matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly/ while the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad/ comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward/ that the meaning, good or other, can never/ become known.” The familiar action depicted here, as in “Two Scenes”, “Parergon”, and many other poems, is that of objects or insights swimming into view and capturing our attention, then dashing off, only to be replaced by something else. It is the Ashberian leitmotiv, receiving its most sustained articulation in the 13-page “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, which takes Parmigianino’s eponymous painting as an index of the soul’s experience of reality: “The time of day or the density of the light/ Adhering to the face keeps it/ Lively and intact in a recurring wave/ of arrival. The soul establishes itself.” We might call this process, this “recurring wave of arrival”, Ashbery’s “philosophy of life” (the title of a later poem), without fearing too much that our judgments are off base or overly bold.  Such judgments offer us a momentary stay against confusion. But only a momentary one, as Ashbery has a peculiar ability to cast off catch-all labels as readily as he invites them.

Hunting for Ashbery’s poetic influences is in many ways a frustrating affair, since among major contemporary poets he has the greatest knack for making the familiar unfamiliar. But several examples do come to mind, such as the last line of “Parergon”, “Though undying joyousness, caught in that trap,” which inverts the ominous-then-hopeful sentiment of birds descending “downward to darkness, on extended wings” at the end of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” By a similar token, the phrase “all was ominous, luminous,” from the poem “Errors”, seems to chime with Elizabeth Bishop’s famous phrase “awful but cheerful”, from “The Bight.” Intimations of Eliot abound, mostly in the form of Prufrockian “You and I’s” and passages like “Here I am then,/ continuing but ever beginning/ my perennial voyage, into new memories” (from “The Skaters”), which mingles “Gerontion” and Four Quartets.

But one can never be sure of the nature or significance of these echoes and reconfigurations. Rather than borrow or steal from other poets, Ashbery seems to eat them, incorporating some completely into his DNA while leaving others grotesquely undigested. “The Lady of Shalott’s in hot water again”, he writes in “Darlene’s Hospital”, gagging on Tennyson. This sort of half-baked flippancy is also apparent in a poem like “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” notable for its appalling use of rhyme: “But of all the sights that were seen by me/ in the East or West, on land or sea,/ the best was the place that is spelled H-O-M-E.”

While obviously intentional, such incomplete digestion of the poetic tradition elicits an equal and opposite form of indigestion in us, an unsteady foreboding about what we have just consumed. Wouldn’t we rather read “The Lady of Shalott” than this? Ashbery’s main flaw is his tendency to ridicule tradition with ungainly humor, stopping short of truly incisive criticism. Whereas Eliot and Pound used Tennyson as a whipping-boy, Ashbery dumps a bucket of slime on his head and runs off giggling.

The Greek lyric poet Archilocus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Ashbery is both a fox and a hedgehog. He knows many things (and even more words), but is also fixated on one big thing: human consciousness. It is this schizophrenic quality that makes him so hard to pigeonhole and so fascinating a character. Is he a maximalist transcendentalist, in the tradition of Emerson, Whitman and Stevens, as Harold Bloom would have him, an avant-gardist and post-surrealist extending the bounds of (non)sense, is he a caricature of both, or is he a great original? If we asked Ashbery this question, he would simply shrug and then quote his poem “Houseboat Days”:

……………………….The mind
Is so hospitable, taking in everything
Like boarders, and you don’t see until
It’s all over how little there was to learn
Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated. . .

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford, and writing a thesis on John Ashbery and landscape.

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Donmar West End
Directed by Michael Grandage
Running until 7 March 2009

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Donmar West End’s production of Twelfth Night aspires to the condition of music, but never finds the right pitch. A string quartet’s angry chord brings Orsino, tormented by his unrequited love for the countess Olivia, on stage. It is a brutal blast of sound, overwhelming any hint of tenderness. This music might feed murderous rages, but it is certainly not “the food of love”. Viola, shipwrecked on a strange island, misses her music too, almost shouting her way through some of Shakespeare’s saddest, most melodious words: “What should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium.” Most offensive of all, though, are the songs. The clown Feste begins well enough, accompanying himself on the guitar. Without warning, though, a chorus of strings enters, piped in through the sound system, utterly obliterating the beautiful simplicity of a single voice and instrument.

These all may seem trivial points against Michael Grandage’s extravagantly praised production. But they are symptomatic of a staging deaf to subtlety and nuance, one that plays Shakespeare’s comedy at a constant and unremitting fortissimo. The central performances are almost uniformly overwrought, and there is little in the direction that suggests a deeper understanding of the play’s dynamics. The production as a whole falls prey to some lamentable fashions in West End theatre: bland design, unimaginative direction and, most disappointingly, central performances that rely more on technique than psychological acuity.

Like Grandage’s first production of the Donmar West End season, which showcased Kenneth Branagh as Chekhov’s Ivanov, the staging of Twelfth Night is little more than a star vehicle. Sir Derek Jacobi has a grand old time as the inflated butler Malvolio, giving a master class in pomposity to match Branagh’s earlier one in states of despair. Jacobi is extremely funny, as Branagh was extremely bleak. However, both performances showcase far more their virtuosity as actors than their sensitivity to character. The challenges of the roles are quite different, but both require moments of extreme rawness to rise above stereotype. For all their extraordinary talents, neither Branagh nor Jacobi can quite conjure the depths. As a consequence, they seem like great actors in less-than-great roles.

Ivanov allows an actor many moments of high drama, but the young Chekhov’s lines do not live up to the despair of the character. Between Ivanov’s words and actions there is a gap that Branagh’s performance, very much in the classical vein of language-driven theatre, elided. The play Ivanov can be powerful and even shattering, but only when we feel the character’s failure of communication acutely. The words came too easily to Branagh (this may be partly the fault of Tom Stoppard’s immensely fluid translation); the character was too composed, too heroic. His finest moment was the one when speech failed, an extended silence as he slumped to the ground in desperation. When Branagh opened his mouth, though, it was impossible to forget that he is one of the stage’s greatest speakers. I left the theatre impressed, but not moved.

Malvolio, however, should be a star turn, as Ivanov should not. Jacobi, by no means as showy an actor as Branagh, lends the role an appropriately heroic silliness. The physicality is perfectly calibrated to Malvolio’s pompous, declamatory speech, which Jacobi delivers as if he were chewing the scenery as Macbeth or Hamlet. Indeed, he seems to be on autopilot, enjoying his romp too much to bring out more in the character than the obvious. This is particularly frustrating in the scene where Malvolio’s makes his final appearance after being humiliated, imprisoned, and nearly driven mad by a prank gone out of control. The moment, which can be a stinging indictment of the lovers’ giddy world turned upside-down, is for Jacobi another chance to go over the top. In his angry cadenza, he misses Malvolio’s extraordinary silence, the way language fails him utterly in responding to the malicious trick. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is of a different register from the rest of Malvolio’s speech: visceral and angry, after all pretence. It is neither heroic nor anti-heroic; it is merely deflated. But Jacobi has not stopped being a star, and his delivery remains in the high style; he does not sink to the occasion.

Perhaps due to Jacobi’s magnetism, the central love triangle seems largely forgotten, and with it, the romance of the play. Though many reviewers have praised the Viola of Victoria Hamilton, I found her performance undynamic. As she finds herself dressed as a boy, in love with her employer Orsino, and wooing Olivia on his behalf (who in turn falls for the her/him), we do not feel the humor of the situation, only its confusion. Indira Varma’s Olivia displays a cold intellect when resisting advances, but fails to conjure the vulnerability of her own passion. As Orsino, Mark Bonnar gets no better after the misjudged entrance; he remains at a high pitch of self-regard throughout, too much a bore to be convincing as a lover. Where the play demands a delicate three-way choreography of desire and frustration, none seems very attentive to what the others are doing. As a result, we see isolated performances, never an ensemble.

The romantic leads could not be more of a contrast to the raucous assemblage of nobles and domestics that torment Malvolio and provide the play’s low comedy: an appropriately hulking Andrew Aguecheek from Guy Henry, Zubin Varla’s acrobatic, ethereal Feste; best of all, the couple of Ron Cook’s Sir Toby and Samantha Spiro’s Maria has never been quite so tender. The quartet’s scenes capture the joyful dance music of Shakespeare’s text, making their humiliation of Malvolio all the more dissonant. They prove such a centering force for the production that the main love triangle seems marginal in comparison (this is partly Shakespeare’s fault, admittedly—the play’s noble characters are singularly boring). We want to remain with Jacobi and his antagonists below stairs.

The unevenness, perhaps, was to be expected. The poster for the season gave it away: it shows four famous faces (still to come are Judi Dench and Jude Law) staring out at us, dressed in modish black. The publicity for the individual plays again focuses on the lead’s face, without costume or context. We come to see the actors, not the characters; the players, not the play.

This ethos seems to have penetrated the design. Grandage’s productions have been calibrated perfectly so as not to draw attention to themselves. They are attractive but unatmospheric: monolithic, multi-purpose sets; sharp, unobtrusive costumes; most of the visual drama comes from overly dark chiaroscuro lighting. Exchanges are lively and fast-paced—too fast either for Stoppard’s Chekhov or Shakespeare’s language. Dialogue seems designed to get us on, as quickly as possible, to the star’s next moment.

There is nothing wrong with showcasing great actors, and we should be grateful to have Branagh and Jacobi on the London stage when they could be engaged in far more lucrative and less taxing projects. But the problem is that the productions have abdicated any more ambitious goals. Grandage’s direction sterilizes the vodka-soaked desperation of Ivanov’s characters, just as it reduces the intricate counterpoint of Twelfth Night to monotone. These productions ultimately have the effect of dwarfing their stars, doing an injustice to playwright, play and player.

Star-craziness, of course, is not limited to the Donmar. Everywhere one looks in London theatre these days, it is clear that stars sell. Perhaps they are the only way to sell serious, classic theatre (think of Ian McKellen in Lear, Ralph Fiennes in Oedipus, or David Tennant in Hamlet). There is nothing wrong with such productions, but the involvement of big names only increases the burden for a staging to bring something unexpected. The familiarity of player and play creates an even greater need for a director to imagine the work freshly, and for actors to push beyond their comfort zones. Star-driven shows are valuable for the chance to see well-known faces in new masks. They should challenge audience and actor by exploring unexpected dimensions of a familiar presence. As Branagh demonstrated (if all too briefly), this means playing the music of silence.

Joshua Billings is writing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800 at Merton College, Oxford.

Michael Nyman
Videofile
De La War Pavillion, Bexhill-on-Sea
Sat 24 Jan 2009 – Sun 15 Mar 2009

Michael Nyman
DGV: Danse à grande vitesse
The Royal Ballet
The Royal Opera House, London
31 Jan 2009 to 21 Feb 2009

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Friday 23 January marked the beginning of a season of Michael Nyman events at the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. The opening night featured a preview of “Videofile”—an exhibition of digital photographs and video footage collected by the composer over the last 15 years—and a concert that brought together Nyman’s piano-playing and the voice of British soul singer David McAlmont.

One of Britain’s most successful living composers, Nyman has reached his widest audience through his film scores. He became a household name in 1994 when the music he composed for Jane Campion’s The Piano became a global hit, eventually selling over three million copies. The Piano music’s phenomenal success has had mixed consequences for Nyman’s reputation. While the rush of publicity that followed the soundtrack’s enormous commercial success was certainly welcome, the wider public’s enduring perception of The Piano as Nyman’s central achievement has syphoned attention away from the rest of his musical oeuvre—an extensive and growing body of work that was rewarded by a CBE in June 2008.

Nyman is anything but the one-trick pony that The Piano’s enthusiastic reception may suggest. His music systematically straddles generic boundaries, mobilising classical sounds within crisp, well-paced contemporary rhythms, splicing the tonalities of British baroque with those of present-day rock and pop. His compositions revel as much in the moving understatement of a clutch of notes arranged for the piano in simple, repetitive patterns, as they do in the layering of swift, impassioned arpeggios, or in the thundering pulse of deep bass vibrations.

Nyman’s versatility is obvious even if one considers only the works that have emerged from his cinematographic collaborations—a mind-boggling 75 scores in total—which propelled him to global fame. The seeds of this long-lasting relationship with the medium were sown in 1967 when Nyman worked with Peter Greenaway on a short film entitled Five Postcards from Capital Cities. The two men went on to cooperate on seventeen further projects. Experimental, witty, intellectual, and often deeply bizarre, they include The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Prospero’s Books (1991). Nyman has also worked with Neil Jordan (The End of the Affair, 1999), Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, 1997), Laurence Dunmore (The Libertine, 2005), and Michael Winterbottom (notably on Wonderland, 1999, and A Cock and Bull Story, 2006). Most recently, Nyman’s music provided the tense, alternately quivering and taut accompaniment to Man On Wire (2007), James Marsh’s documentary about the spectacular tight-rope crossing between the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers executed by Philip Petit in 1974.

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Prolific though it is, Nyman’s work with the film industry is but one of many strings to his musical bow: he has, for instance, composed a number of operas, provided settings for literary texts, and seized opportunities to write for church bells, the ballet, a fashion show, the opening of a new train line—even for a video game. And Nyman has recently shown signs of wanting to wow the world by more than music alone. In 2008, he published Sublime, a book of over 1,900 digital photographs. From 24 January 2009, the De La Warr Pavilion “Videofile” exhibition offers viewers the chance to see some of these photographs, as well as to gauge Nyman’s début as a video artist through a selection of footage recorded by the composer during his travels around the world.

In 2003, Nyman wrote a score to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera, a cinematographic collage of vignettes of Russian life captured in all its multifarious variety—in towns and villages, homes and factories, in city halls and on city benches, at moments of birth and at times of mourning. In a 2003 BBC interview, Nyman described the movie as “possibly the best silent film I’ve ever seen” and “without doubt, the best film I’ve ever been associated with”. In “Videofile”, Nyman himself has become the man with the movie camera, and he has learned a few tricks from the revered Russian master.

The gallery’s first room is devoted to an installation called Love Train. The piece consists of a single, continuous ten-minute close-up of the iron buffers cast between the carriages of a moving train. Nothing happens: these buffers draw together, draw apart, almost—but never quite—touching. This could be an anodyne railway scene: it is not. Locked in by the physical constraints of the train’s clunking, mechanical structure, the buffers tread water, dance, and stroke in a ballet of rehearsed, forever postponed embraces. There is something hypnotic and poignant in the nearness of the buffers’ misses—in the irregular, faltering, and wholly inadequate caresses of these excrescences of inanimate matter. An excerpt from the Nyman sound archive enhances the effect. The music encourages metaphorical interpretations: the iron buffers, like arms extended, become invested with symbolic significance, representing the hesitations and uncertainties, tenderness and transience of human relationships.

Mechanised motion was also one of Dziga Vertov’s passions. “Videofile” features other nods in Vertov’s direction. Tea Factory replicates the Russian filmmaker’s fascination with machinery and industrial working conditions. A lone female worker appears amid a metallic jungle of spinning cylinders and screeching pulleys: human movement is silenced, dwarfed by crushing, grinding, mechanical forces. All of the sounds in Tea Factory are location sounds: none of Nyman’s music intervenes to lyricise the deafening noise of giant rotating sieves, threshing combine harvesters and gyrating turbines. Tea Factory seems intended as a tribute to sound under all its manifestations, at least as much as a document witnessing exceedingly noisy working conditions. Tea Factory provides an illustration, by default, of the transformative power of music: there can be no doubt, as many of the other videos in the gallery demonstrate, that the viewer’s experience of the film would be utterly different if its images were set to music.

While a great many of Nyman’s films and photographs betray an absorption with the everyday and the chance encounter, one double piece, entitled Witness 1 and Witness 2, explores darker concerns. The topic matter is the Holocaust. Witness 1 features police photos of gypsies interned in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Faces appear hauntingly, filtering like holograms through a veil. In Witness 2 pictures of Polish Jews killed at Auschwitz fade in through images of the wooden slats from which their camp accommodation was made. The beautiful oscillations from fading-in to fade-out are masterfully executed. The Witness dyad is an elegiac visual poem, which blends with Nyman’s music in a way that is moving without being sentimental. The closing shot, of Nazi railway tracks, makes for an arresting and emotive reversed echo of the tenderness evoked by the railway images shown in Love Train.

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The second part of the Bexhill launch, a concert, provided exemplification of the composer’s openness to collaboration and confirmed a readiness to bring his music into dialogue with the world of pop. The first half of the event featured solo piano renditions of a number of Nyman’s most successful tunes, most notably from the soundtracks to (somewhat inevitably) The Piano, Wonderland and Gattaca. For Nyman’s admirers, there was scope for disappointment in the composer’s choice of a programme so confined to Nyman’s most established hits. Yet the audience’s pleasure in the music—at least some of which was attributable to the concentrated, delectable sharpness of Nyman’s performance—was tangible. After the interval, David McAlmont sang to Nyman’s piano, with vocals and lyrics entirely his own. The latter were characterized by a plainness verging on the banal. This simplicity was probably deliberate, and certainly accords with minimalist aesthetics, yet at times the insipidity of the wording imperilled an otherwise artful blending of sounds. In spite of this, the alliance worked well overall, with the astounding high-pitched clarity of McAlmont’s voice bringing something fresh to Nyman’s more familiar pieces.

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Nyman is not only at Bexhill. He is also at the Royal Opera House. In 1993 the French company TGV (or Train à Grande Vitesse) commissioned Nyman to write a piece to mark the opening of a new train line between Lille and Paris. The outcome was MGV: Musique à Grande Vitesse, a 26-minute piece featuring elating, propulsive, rhythms that put a certain joy back into the idea of transport. In 2006 Christopher Wheeldon adapted MGV for the ballet and named the result DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse. DGV is at the Royal Ballet throughout January and February.

DGV is an absolute triumph. Wheeldon’s 26 dancers (one for each minute of Nyman’s music) crowd the stage, conjuring a highly uplifting sense of mass movement. The piece is fiercely energetic. At the outset, arms flourished in waving gestures evoke the anticipation of departure. As the journey begins, horizontal lifts executed across the stage generate a sense of dashing forward movement. Dancers glide ethereally from one end of the stage to the other, spinning and swaying in stylised recall of train mechanics.

Throughout their execution of a swift and vibrant choreography, DGV’s dancers convey a surreal sense of weightlessness and suspension. But DGV also comprises some astonishing slow movements—with even some brief moments of total arrest—again, these varying velocities adumbrate the stopping-and-starting that characterises train travel. At one breathtaking point the music stops abruptly and the lights go out, leaving the central couple silently suspended, mid-lift, in the surrounding darkness of a metaphorical tunnel. There are also moments of tenderness and delicacy, which recall the coupling motif of Nyman’s Love Train video.

In its final stages, the piece returns to a mode of frenzied, exalting speed. Extra drums, installed in the stalls situated closest to the stage, contribute to an exhilarating sense of an approach to destination; the choreography matches these demanding rhythms— building up to a viscerally thrilling conclusion.

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Nyman’s postmodern polyvalence is everywhere evident in his latest offerings. His determination to experiment with new partnerships and his commitment to the conjugation of art forms show no sign of abating. Forty years may have passed since he embarked on his composing career, but the Nyman of 2009 is still very much an artist creating and evolving à grande vitesse.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. The Interviews editor for the Oxonian Review, she is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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For information see:

Michael Nyman’s website

The Nyman-related programme of events at the De La Warr Pavilion

The DGV page on the Royal Opera House website

Tobias Hill
The Hidden
Faber and Faber, 2009
352 pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0571218387

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At one point during Tobias Hill’s new novel, The Hidden, a protagonist describes Greece as the grandfather of all Europe. This familial relationship, somewhat primeval, somewhat allegorical, increases the power of the story, giving it a kind of universal resonance. Hill’s Greece is a place where gods and monsters once roamed free, equally dangerous, and a place where legendary history overshadows the more prosaic but equally monstrous present, concealing it from reader and narrator until it is almost too late.

Greece is the perfect setting for a novel in which events and people remain part-hidden and half-understood. Hill’s protagonist and narrator, Ben Mercer, is an Oxford scholar in Classics and Archaeology, with the tenuous beginnings, almost abandoned, of a thesis on Sparta. Excerpts from it are interwoven through the novel, raising the themes of war, death, and secrets. As the novel begins, Mercer arrives in Athens, having left Oxford in the wake of his divorce, and finds himself purposeless, directionless and alone. It is not the Greece of his studies; he gets a job in a restaurant, living in rooms above with three Albanians, working long hours in less than savoury surroundings. Hill touches on modern conflict and corruption here, with references to the recent history of Greece, the struggles and the ideologies, the political impositions of the countries that liberated Greece from fascism.

But politics appear to be forgotten when a chance meeting with an old college acquaintance leads Mercer to an archaeological dig in Sparta itself. There he finds a cabal of foreigners, drawn from all over the world, working with a handful of native Greeks and the increasingly isolated dig director. An undertow of sinister factionism hardly prevents Mercer from being drawn towards the clique of the other “shovel-monkeys” and towards the friendship that dominates the second half of the novel.

Comparison of Hill’s narrative with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is inevitable: both involve a secretive group of classicists, to which the narrator desperately desires admittance; gaining that admittance, he finds that the golden apples are poisonous, shot through with worms of violence and monstrosity.  In some ways, it is the story of the Fall of Man: Mercer eats of the Tree of Knowledge and immediately wishes that he had not, as he is drawn into a violent secret that makes passivity an act of evil in itself.

Hill began his writing career as a poet, and this comes through clearly in his prose fiction. The novel’s language is beautifully resonant and rhythmic, crystallizing the country of Homer into tiny evocative vignettes. We read the journey in phrases rather than sentences, each a single perfect image: “An avenue of bulbous palms, ivy growing up their flanks like military coats.”  “A dog in a ditch, dead and swollen as a fruit. The Corinth Canal, deep and sleek as a gun.”

This poetic language is both a strength and a weakness. Extracts from Mercer’s thesis and from a lecture given by one of the other characters both ring slightly false—too perfect, too poetic—lacking in prosaic scholarly exactitude, as when “their archers carried bows as long as they themselves were tall.” The novel is also slow to reach the action, first of the dig, and then of the underlying secret, which frustrates the reader, but perhaps reflects the narrator’s naiveté. We are sympathetic to him, since, despite deceiving himself about his new friends, he never succeeds in truly misleading us, and we wish him back in the time of innocence.

The themes of hidden secrets, of archaeological excavation of lives and mysteries, of monstrosity, both literal and metaphorical, have come to dominate Hill’s novels. A number of skeletons come to light in the excavation. They belong to infants left to die on a rubbish heap because of their monstrous forms.  The question of what makes a monster is one that is asked over and over again in different ways through the novel: are these children the monsters or were those who abandoned them? Were the results of British liberation worse than fascism?  And if a man commits a monstrous act and remains unpunished, is taking the law into your own hands permissible?

The book is tightly woven in its references and no word is carelessly used. “The hidden” of the title were a band of elite Spartan warriors, chosen not for their fighting skills but for their discretion. They lived in caves in the mountains that dominate the landscape of the area, sleeping by day, and coming out by night to enforce the curfew on the helot class—by killing those who disobeyed. Fear and terror were the only way the Spartans could keep control of their underclass, which vastly outnumbered them. The modern cabal seeks to emulate the ancient hidden ones, a realisation that comes to the narrator and reader very late in the book. But there are many other things hidden. The narrator has his own secret; each of the other characters has his or her own particularly hidden reason for being on an archaeological excavation in the middle of nowhere in the midst of a wet Greek winter.

Hidden, too, are the crimes of the everyday: things that were evil in some way, that lurk in the past, behind the scenery, behind every person that we meet. Nothing is as innocent as it appears, seems to be the message. No one is innocent, perhaps, and we find ourselves in grey and disturbing moral territory at the end of the novel. The word “monster”, Hill tells us, comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning a warning. In ancient Greece you could tell a monster from its appearance: a centaur, half-bull, half-man, or a snake-haired Gorgon. The message of The Hidden is that it is just not that easy to spot the monsters anymore.

Victoria Elliott is a DPhil student at Exeter College, Oxford, studying Education.