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Book review

A View from the Bridge, by Arthur Miller, 1955

A View from the Bridge is set in 1950s New York in an Italian-American neighbourhood. It is narrated by Alfieri, a lawyer, who opens the play by describing the violent history of the Italian/American community. He tells us that second-generation Italians are now more civilized and they use the law to resolve their disagreements. But there are exceptions, one of which is the story of the play.

Eddie Carbone, an Italian American dock worker, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Eddie is protective and fatherly towards Catherine, but it slowly becomes apparent that as she approaches her 18th birthday his feelings for her are becoming dangerously unfatherly, especially as his relationship with his wife is no longer sexual. Catherine is ready to start stretching her wings and step out from the protective shadow of Eddie. He objects to her taking a job and to the way she dresses, anything that would expose her to the attention of other men. Beatrice seems to be aware that Eddie’s feelings towards Catherine are no longer purely paternal and encourages her to take the job, as a step towards eventual freedom and independence.

One afternoon Eddie breaks the news that he has agreed to accommodate two of Beatrice’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, who have arrived in New York as illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration was strictly enforced at this period in American history, which tells us some things don’t change, and if discovered the cousins are almost certain to be deported. However, within the protective Italian American community they are still able to work. Life back home in Italy is poverty stricken and immigrating to America using a network of people smugglers is a common means of escape.

Rodolpho is the more flamboyant of the two brothers – Marco is more brooding. While Marco plans to eventually return to Italy, Rodolpho wants to forge a career as a singer. His tendency to break into song while working on the docks attracts the wrong type of comment. Difference is suspect, and Eddie thinks (and perhaps hopes) he might be gay. This suspicion only becomes an issue when Rodolpho and Catherine start dating. Put simply, Eddie is jealous. When his attempts to ‘lay down the law’ and break them up fail, Eddie seeks advice from Alfieri, hoping that the law will prevent Catherine and Rodolpho from marrying. Of course he has no proof that Rodolpho is gay and is just marrying Catherine for a passport. Alfieri tells him the only thing he can do is report Rodolpho and Marco as illegal aliens, but this advice is framed as something that is unthinkable in the context of the ethics of the community. Time passes and things deteriorate, with Eddie becoming frantic about the trajectory of Catherine and Rodolpho’s relationship. Desperate (and drunk) he tries to prove Rodolpho is gay by kissing him. He then goes back to Alfieri, claiming that the kiss and specifically Rodolpho’s reaction, proves he is gay. Alfieri repeats his advice – the law cannot help. Eddie then does something that is taboo – even more so than being gay or wanting to sleep with your step-daughter – he reports the brothers to immigration services. The officials arrest Marco and Rodolpho and while Eddie claims the arrest is a surprise he convinces no-one. He is treated as persona non grata by the community. Alfieri bails the brothers out of custody but as soon as he is released Marco confronts Eddie, a fight breaks out and tragedy ensues.

A View from the Bridge has an interesting production history. It was first staged in 1955 as a one-act play. After it was poorly received Miller revised and extended the play to two acts. This longer play was much more successful and is the version most often performed today and is the one I read. The play’s origins go back to 1947. Miller was researching a screenplay in an area of New York near the docks. That screenplay eventually became ‘The Hook,’ which was based on a true story about corruption in the longshoremen’s union. Miller asked his friend Elia Kazan to direct the film, but when they tried to get funding for the shoot Columbia Pictures insisted in changes to the screenplay, in particular that the focus be changed from corrupt union leaders to Communists. Miller refused and the film was never made. Fast forward a few years and Kazan was making ‘On the Waterfront’, which is very closely based on ‘The Hook’. Kazan had testified before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities naming several of his former friends and fellow Communists, leading to them being blacklisted and struggling for years to find work in America – some had to go to the extreme of moving to the UK to work in cinema and theatre. Miller had been called before HUAC but had pleaded ‘the fifth’ i.e. refused to testify. ‘On the Waterfront’ was an attempt to excuse Kazan’s betrayal of his friends. In this Hollywood version of McCarthyism, those who betray their friends are the heroes. A View from the Bridge is Miller’s dramatic response to that argument. Betraying your friends is not heroic – but neither is it a simple case of villainy. Miller seems to be arguing that those who betray their families and friends are obviously in the wrong, but that their motivations can be complex and in some ways understandable. The play is obviously much more than a simple response to McCarthyism, but this context does inform any reading of the play. And of course the drama has much more significant contemporary resonance, with the issues of deportation and what it means to be American once more front and centre of the political stage. Any modern production that does not have the immigration officers dressed as ICE thugs would be missing a dramatic open goal.

A View from the Bridge, by Arthur Miller, 1955

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Book review

I’ve read some obscure books over the last few years, but N F Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle, is up there! The play is a striking example of English Absurdism. This was always a bit of a niche genre and reading ART you can see why.

The Theatre of the Absurd was a relatively short-lived genre widely thought to have been inspired by Albert Camus’s description of the human condition as absurd and devoid of purpose. Firmly rooted in the post-war period as humanity recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust, absurdism was expressed on stage by plays devoid of the structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic conventional action – the characters find things to do, but they are invariably pointless. These plays have little that could be described as a plot. Language breaks down, is disjointed, and revolves around repetition, misunderstandings and a focus on trivialities. Through this fractured dialogue, broken by occasional bursts of eloquence, the characters express their psychological distress. The plays also often use comedic routines and traditions from vaudeville, and music hall.

I think it would be fair to argue that there is no grand absurdist tradition in English drama – the genre quickly evolved more complex forms and moved away from its origins. Which is why A Resounding Tinkle is an important text, albeit a very obscure one – it perfectly encapsulates these absurdist conventions. There is not even the semblance of a plot. Characters repeatedly break the fourth wall addressing the audience directly. At the end of the play a group of critics sit around discussing the performance they have just seen, anticipating the audience’s bemused reaction, followed by closing comments by ‘the author’. Two characters, Mr and Mrs Paradock, discuss the elephant they have been given as part of an annual celebration of some kind, and in the end exchange it with their neighbours for a very small snake in a pencil box. This scene would not have been out of place in a Monty Python sketch – and it could be argued that the absurdist genre in English theatre was quickly redirected into comedy having itself been influenced by the loosely structured surrealism of shows such as The Goons.

Perhaps not surprisingly, A Resounding Tinkle is rarely performed today. It is very much of its time, and I can imagine on stage it would appear dated. But the absurdist tradition has never really gone away, and lines such as “You remind me of a cormorant with a beak a yard long tapping out a manifesto to the cosmos on a second-hand typewriter” are reminiscent of the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. Perhaps a revival is overdue?

A Resounding Tinkle (play) by N F Simpson, 1957

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Book review

Capital, by John Lanchester, 2012

I’ve written quite a bit in the past about different categories of novel – most recently Newgate novels for example, nineteenth century stories about prisoners awaiting trial in Newgate. or the earlier Silver Fork novels about rich Regency people doing rich Regency people things. The problem is – where do you stop? Where do you stop creating ever finer more detailed sub-categories of novel? This problem occurred to me when reading John Lanchester’s 2023 novel Capital.

As well as obviously being about London and its inhabitants, Capital is more specifically a credit crunch novel, a literary response to the financial crash of 2008. It was published in 2012 which makes it a a relatively early response to the crash, when the full impacts of austerity had yet to be played out. In Capital people are still manically developing their houses with basements and loft extensions, even if the early seeds of doubt about the wisdom of this reckless spending are being sown; later post-Brexit crash novels (or are they a separate category?) see that this reckless spending is not without consequence. The worst that happens to a banker made redundant part way through Capital is that he has to sack his nanny and retire to the country with his money, confident that he will bounce back. Where am I going with this point? I suppose I am arguing that instead of simply being an ambitious survey of life in modern-day London, Capital is a more immediate response to political and economic circumstances that might not have the durability and longevity the author was obviously aiming for. It’s also a novel that addresses that very specific problem of gentrification, without having much to say about the issue other than vaguely suggesting it is not a good thing.

Capital follows the inhabitants of a south London street, Pepys Road, over the course of a year. The choice of name is obviously not coincidental – Pepys was a great chronicler of London-life, and it seems Lanchester aspires to do the same. Pepys Road is undergoing dramatic changes as London society responds to a influx of new residents from around the globe. As we are introduced to a series of immigrants – a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny, a Senegalese footballer and a Zimbabwean traffic warden – one wonders whether these are much more than stereotypes? Their stories are juxtaposed with those of earlier residents, now undergoing their own diaspora as they are forced out of Pepys Road.

“Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner. If you already lived there, you were rich. If you wanted to move there, you had to be rich. It was the first time in history this had ever been true”.

Another of the multiple threads of the novel follows stockbroker Roger Yount. Roger and family live a life of excess fuelled by the multi-million salaries and bonuses common in the City pre-Crash. Roger is an entitled and slightly thick public-school boy relying on nepotism to get along in a business he admits he does not really understand. His wife Arabella is a bit of a monster, spending her days shopping for designer nonsense and having long boozy lunches with girlfriends while her children are cared for by a series of nannies. We care little for Roger and Arabella, equally stereotypes in their own way, and celebrate their downfall as Roger first gets a disappointing five figure bonus, and is then sacked and has to rethink his life

Most of the storylines peter out – they have endings of sorts but I was insufficiently engaged with the characters to worry overly if they go on to live long and happy lives. Ends are tied up but with a conspicuous sense of ends being tied up so that the novel could finish rather than narratives being successfully concluded. A good example of this is the young African footballer who comes to the UK to play, suffers as career-ending injury, and goes back home with riches beyond imagination and still able to play football locally – a happy ending of sorts but hard to see where it fits in the overall narrative, other than being just another story of the residents of Pepys Road.

At over 600 pages this was harder work than it ought to have been. The years immediately after the Crash in which this novel is set seem a lifetime ago. If I had read Capital when it was first published it would have had an immediacy that it now lacks given how much has happened since then – it’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for 2012!

Capital, by John Lanchester, 2012

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Book review

Anti-semitism in Britain, by George Orwell, 1945

George Orwell was a boyhood hero of mine. Here was someone prepared to say unpopular things, to go against the flow of public opinion and to speak truth to power. The major novels, 1984 and Animal Farm led me to his earlier work including Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air, and then on to his journalism and essays, all written in that distinctive, clear, very personal voice that seemed to know the answers to all of the important questions. If Orwell thought something was wrong, it probably was, and adopting his position on an issue was a useful guide to being on the right side of the argument. So his thoughts on anti-Semitism in this article, written early in 1945, must surely be worth reading?

It’s not clear what research, if any, Orwell did before writing this essay, nor indeed what specifically prompted him to write it in the first place. He starts his article by reporting a series of anti-Semitic comments overheard on the tube and in shops. Perhaps one of these comments was the trigger? The issue of anti-Semitism itself was unavoidable given the ongoing Holocaust in Europe. The essay was written in February and published in April 1945, just as the war in Europe was ending. It conceivable that this was before the full horror of the Holocaust was widely understood, although Hitler’s determination to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe was hardly a secret (see here for example  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/allied-declaration-on-persecution-of-the-jews.)

The overall tone of the essay is almost conversational, along the lines of Orwell saying ‘here are a few interesting thoughts I would like to share about a topic that has caught my attention’. Rather than simply condemning anti-Semitism, Orwell claims to attempt to understand it, and even goes so far as to acknowledge some anti-Semitic ideas and beliefs within himself. He tentatively identifies the origins of the prejudice in nationalism:

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form.

And concludes that to defeat anti-Semitism we will have to defeat nationalism. For an author famed for the clarity of his expression, the point where Orwell concludes his article on the issue is convoluted to say the least:

“…antisemitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.”

What he doesn’t do is identify any specific features of anti-Jewish prejudice that makes it so insidious and harmful. Equally there is little research in the article, and personal anecdotes only go so far to explore the topic. Much as it pains me to accept it, throughout his previous writings Orwell occasionally expressed anti-Semitic ideas and used anti-Semitic tropes. I am not going to repeat them here – the internet will help you find them easily enough if you are interested. They make painful reading, much like his homophobic comments – casually dismissive and hurtful towards people who are different from him. But while many people go through their lives holding on to their prejudices, Orwell at least had the willingness to confront his own. He recognises his anti-Semitism, and tries to understand its origins and place it in context:

Thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and – though superior in intelligence – slightly deficient in ‘character’. In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was debarred from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a ‘smart’ regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible. About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and began a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship and wanting money to get back. His manner and appearance were difficult to ‘place’, and I said to him:

‘You speak very good English. What nationality are you?’

He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: ‘I am a Joo, sir!’

And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke, ‘He admits it openly.’

Later he poses the question this way:

(We should not ask) Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?’ but ‘Why does antisemitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?’ If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s own rationalizations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them. 

It’s an interesting starting point – asking people with anti-Semitic ideas and values to help with understanding the origins of those ideas and values. I’m not convinced Orwell was able to complete the exploration he proposes here – while he retained many Jewish friends for the remainder of his short life, he never acknowledged the pain and harm his thoughtless comments caused, and allowed his diaries to survive for publication with the comments intact (I recognise that may not have been a deliberate plan of course). I accept that he was hardly unique among British writers and intellectuals of the period in having these views, but that is only very partial mitigation. It’s hard to imagine someone writing this piece today when I think we have a better understanding of the causes of racial prejudice in all its forms. Orwell was a product of his time and class as we all are, and passing historical judgment on his views really only takes us so far. It’s also ridiculous to consider his views as monolithic and unchanging over time, when he went to such extraordinary lengths to challenge the ideas and prejudices that he was brought up with. Christopher Hitchens’ fantastic and highly readable essay on Orwell’s progression from bigoted public schoolboy to class-ally is in this context a must-read.

It is sad and hard to process each time one of our childhood heroes is shown to be less than heroic, but there’s no point in trying to ignore their failings either. That doesn’t make Orwell a bad writer, or his ideas less interesting, but the process of seeing him and others as flawed, fallible human beings can be painful.

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Book review

Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, 1853

Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street‘ tells the curious story of a scrivener – a copyist – who gives up on work and life, responding to all requests for him to do anything with the simple “I would prefer not to“. The narrator, his employer, knows almost nothing about Bartleby – he remains an enigma throughout the story. His reasons for declining specific tasks and then for stopping work altogether are let to the reader to decide.

The story opens with an introduction by the narrator, an elderly New York lawyer. He employs two clerks, Nippers and Turkey, to copy legal documents by hand. Nippers and Turkey are, as their names suggest, comic figures, both with substance abuse issues. The narrator, looking to expand his business, hires Bartleby, partly in the hope that he will moderate the extremes of temperaments of the other two. Initially Bartleby is an exemplary worker, but one day, when asked to help proofread a document, he answers with what soon becomes his catchphrase:

“I would prefer not to”.

Bartleby slowly shuts down, completing less and less work and spending long periods of time staring out one of the window at a brick wall. All attempts to persuade him to do some work or to leave fail, so eventually the narrator himself moves out. The new tenants come to him to ask for help in removing Bartleby, who now sits on the stairs all day and sleeps in the building’s doorway. Finally Bartleby is forcibly removed and imprisoned where he dies of starvation. The story closes with the narrator’s refrain, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”. (This phrase reminded me of the words of the newscaster at the explosion of the Hindenburg).

This is an enigmatic story, not what I was expecting at all from the author of Moby Dick. It’s an intense psychological piece reflecting on the pointlessness of the human condition that could easily have come from a French existentialist author. It is also a very personal piece – for an author to imagine a character who thinks writing – scrivening – is a pointless, empty activity is in some ways quite shocking. Melville is very much ahead of his time in other ways – Bartleby can be read as a warning of the industrialisation of office work in which people are hemmed into ever smaller cubicles without any personal life outside the office, eating meagre meals at their desk, performing menial repetitive tasks for little reward (Bartleby moves into the lawyers office and never seems to leave).

“Ah, Bartleby, Ah humanity”.

Bartleby is a short story but an immensely impactful and surprising piece that I am very glad to have read – it gives another dimension to one of America’s most significant authors who I had previously only known through Moby Dick.

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Book review

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, 1890

Recently I came across this gem of a post on the ever-wonderful LitHub about the best short stories ever written and it prompted me to guiltily read more of this neglected (by me) genre (although this is a great list, there are some obvious omissions; Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder is missing for a start. A Sound of Thunder is the “butterfly effect” story in which time-travellers to the age of the dinosaurs inadvertently affect the future.) Most of the stories on this list can easily read in less than an hour and they are usually available for free on the internet.

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge eBook: Ambrose Bierce: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

I started with An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge for reasons of nostalgia. I have a vivid memory of being shown the film adaptation of this story in school one day – I have no idea in what lesson – and to this day it seems a very dark film to show schoolchildren.

An Occurrence is a/the near perfect short story. The title is carefully understated, but we soon learn the nature of the occurrence due to happen on the bridge – a man is to be hung. You probably are familiar with the story and its wonderfully executed (forgive me) twist, but just in case you aren’t I am going to avoid summarising the plot – with the whole story running to only a handful of pages any summary would be largely redundant anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut famously described An Occurrence as “that greatest American short story….a flawless example of American genius“. Without wanting to pick an argument with Mr Vonnegut there’s nothing uniquely American about the story nor its conception. Being just an American story would diminish it. Its universality lies in the use of point of view narration. The reader trusts the story we are being told by the captured (and clearly guilty) plantation owner about to be hung from the bridge because we have been taught to trust narrators. Why would someone about to die mislead us about what happens. His apparent escape from his fate is plausible simply because of the conventional understanding that he must have survived in order to tell his tale.

The narrative emphasises the mundane and everyday nature of what is happening. This is an occurrence, nothing more. A man is about to die, but this is something that in war happens all the time. The setting is just Owl Creek Bridge, an insignificant bridge over an insignificant stream. Everyone involved in the execution is calm and business-like, even the condemned man himself. Everything is ordered and well-prepared.

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.

The execution is being carried out with military precision, so it is a shock when, remarkably, an opportunity to escape appears:

All at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!—the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface—knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable.

An Occurrence is much more than a commentary on war and what men will do for their country. It reminds us that life is short and sweet, and that our perception of time can be strangely distorted in the moment. It also teaches us that narrators and authors can be misleading, and that wishful thinking is a powerful thing. It is also an object lesson in the importance of close and careful reading. If you just engage with this text as an adventure story you will almost certainly miss the clear indications that there is more to this story than the narrator tells us. Bierce wrote about “bad readers—readers who, lacking the habit of analysis, lack also the faculty of discrimination, and take whatever is put before them”. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad reader, but we can all read more carefully and analytically, not taking at face value what we are told, whether it be a short story, a novel, or the news on our screens, and An Occurrence is an object lesson in why this an important skill.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, 1890

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