Nicci French Blog

The Very Dickens

I'm just listening to, and very much enjoying The Pickwick Papers. It's a young man's book, full of inexhaustible high spirits. In the first couple of hundred pages you can feel Dickens discovering his volcanic powers. It almost scorches you. There are lots of fine books and essays about Dickens, but my favourite is by G.K. Chesterton, and my favourite passage is about The Pickwick Papers (it should best be read while listening to something like Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending):

'To the level of "Sketches by Boz" he never afterwards descended. To the level of "The Pickwick Papers" it is doubtful if he ever afterwards rose. "Pickwick," indeed, is not a good novel; but it is not a bad novel, for it is not a novel at all. In one sense, indeed, it is something nobler than a novel, for no novel with a plot and a proper termination could emit that sense of everlasting youth - a sense as of the gods gone wandering in England. This is not a novel, for all novels have an end; and "Pickwick," properly speaking, has no end - he is equal unto the angels. The point at which, as a fact, we find the printed matter terminates is not an end in any artistic sense of the word. Even as a boy I believed there were some more pages that were torn out of my copy, and I am looking for them still.The book might have been cut short anywhere else. It might have been cut short after Mr. Pickwick was released by Mr. Nupkins, or after Mr. Pickwick was fished out of the water, or at a hundred other places. And we should still have known that this was not really the story's end. We should have known that Mr. Pickwick was still having the same high adentures on the same high roads. As it happens the book ends after Mr. Pickwick has taken a house in the neighbourhood of Dulwich. But we know he did not stop there. We know he broke out, that he took again the road of the high adventures; we know that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England, we may come suddenly upon him in a lane.'

 

 

 

My Fantasy Week with Marilyn

We just watched My Week with Marilyn. It's based on the 'true story' of young Colin Clark (brother of Alan, son of Kenneth Clark) when he was an assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl. The first third or so of the film is very enjoyable, Kenneth Branagh's impersonation of Laurence Olivier is hilarious and Michelle Williams is delightful as Monroe. But here are some of things I don't believe really happened:

1) That Clark spent the night in her bed.

2) That he took her on an improvised of Windsor Castle.

3) Ditto of his old school, Eton College.

4) That he went skinny dipping with Marilyn. 'Imagine skinnydipping with Marilyn!' David Denby rhapsodized in the New Yorker. I think that's exactly what Colin Clark did do: imagine it.

Like many films based on true stories, My Week with Marilyn is actually based on other movies. Specifically, The King's Speech, in which a minor historical character's role in history is wildly exaggerated (Australian speech therapist helps Britain win the war). The story is based on the amusing 1982 comedy, My Favourite Year, in which a young writer on a TV talk show has to spend a few days chaperoning a wildly unreliably movie star (Peter O'Toole playing a character based on Errol Flynn).

Does it matter if it's all a fantasy? Not really, if the film is good. This could have been a wonderful comedy about the damage Monroe did to everyone around her during the production of a catastrophic movie. But somewhere along the line they lost their nerve. 

 

 

 

Was Frankenstein the guy or the monster?

We watched Frankenstein last night. It says something about the status of the film in the culture that even while watching it I couldn't remember whether I'd actually seen it before. Because even if we haven't seen the film we know about the villagers with flaming torches, about the hunchbacked assistant called Igor (who is actually called Fritz) and above all Boris Karloff's monster, with the bolts in his neck. A few thoughts about the film:

1) Boris Karloff isn't credited. In the credits, the monster is played by '?' Perhaps this was to convince audiences that Universal Pictures had created a real monster out of dead body parts.

2) In the credits it says that the film is 'based on the novel by Mrs Percy B. Shelley', which caused hissing from some of my fellow viewers.

3) Despite some wild acting, the film stands up really well, with its nightmarish architecture and sweeping, long camera movements that Kubrick must have admired. 

4) Karloff's performance has been parodied and mocked and set to music and turned into multiple TV sitcoms. It still clearly remains one of the great performances of the cinema.

I just read the novel as well, which has amazingly little in common with the movie. For example, Mary Shelley is weirdly vague about what Frankenstein actually does to bring the monster to life. And the monster itself is a sort of strange romantic (though murderous) outcast, who learns to speak and philosophize.

Frankenstein is certainly flawed in all sorts of ways, but it is clearly one of the great creations of literature. It is one of that very, very short list of characters that everybody knows about, even if they haven't read the books in which they appear: Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Alice, Frankenstein (and his monster, with whom he is often confused), Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. I can't think of many others. Frankenstein is the only one created by a woman, and Mary Shelley was only nineteen when she started writing it!

PS The headline comes from James Thurber's anecdote about the first editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. He allegedly came out of his office and asked: 'Hey, was Moby Dick the guy or the whale?'

 

 

 

 

 

 

It'll End in Tears

After just watching something like this, I need to lie down in a dark room.

Shelley the Murderer

I've just finished Young Romantics, the really terrific book by Daisy Hay about the circle that had Percy and Mary Shelley at its centre. (It's a curiosity, by the way, that you can talk about John Keats and William Hazlitt, but nobody talks about Percy Shelley or George Byron.)

There's so much to say about that whole circle. But one thing that struck me while reading the book is that you could write a thriller about someone like Shelley. Almost everyone who knew him talked about his kindness, his generosity, his goodness. But for a kind, generous, good man, he was sure responsible for a lot of people dying. My rough tally goes as follows:

1) After he abandoned his first wife, Harriet, she drowned herself in the Serpentine.

2) Mary Shelley's sister Fanny also committed suicide, largely, it seems because she had been brutally abandoned and shut out by Mary and Percy.

(Shortly afterwards, Shelley virtually moved in with Leigh Hunt and then Hunt's sister-in-law, Bess, attempted suicide. Daisy Hay sees a clear connection with Shelley's very demanding presence. Anyway, she survived.)

3) Three of the Shelley's four children died young, and Hay suggests that the death of the second, Clara, was substantially due to Shelley's flagrant disregard of the baby's health.

4) You only need to read Shelley's poems, to realize that he wouldn't be much troubled by the idea of getting into an unseaworthy sailing boat, with no competent sailors and a storm coming. But on the reckless sea journey that killed him, he took with him a devoted friend, Edward Taylor, and an eighteen-year-old boy, Charles Vivian. 

Five people. That's the same as Jack the Ripper. Great poet, though. (Shelley, that is.)

 

You have to be strong to be old

Nicci: As my mother - 80 years old, registered blind, arthritic, disabled, eighteen in her heart and a young girl in her hopes and fears - often tells me: you have to be strong to be old. 

We've just watched Mid-August Lunch, Gianni di Gregorio's adorable, respectful, generous-hearted homage to old people, in which (as well as being writer and director) he plays the part of a man in his late fifties, out of work because looking after his ninety-year-old mother, strapped for cash, run off his feet, a bit melancholy but cheerful and without a whiff of self-pity. The film takes place over 24 hours during which Gianni allows himself to be persuaded to take in three other old women in their late eighties and nineties for the August holiday. He drinks, cooks, smokes, makes up beds and at night goes from room to room to watch them sleeping, like a tender mother. 

These weren't actresses pretending to be old; they were old women whom di Gregorio had cajoled into playing the part of themselves. They really were in their nineties. The camera settled on their wrinkles, sags, liver spots. And it was almost shocking to spend 75 minutes in their wonderful company, because we are so unused to doing so. We gaze at the young and turn away from the old. We don't see them - it's the next civil rights movement. 

There was a moment I found particularly poignant, when one of the women, lying in bed, talks to the exhausted Gianni (who's trying to get her to go to sleep) about her memories of being a child - about looking after her own grandmother. A very old woman remembering being young and watching over a very old woman. We contain all the ages we have ever been: young, old and in-between.

Personality Test

Take a look at this.

Do you think it is:

a) Awesome, or

b) Really rather juvenile.

If the answer is a) you are Sean French; if b) you are Nicci Gerrard.

The Theatre Formerly Known as Comedy

We went to see the revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends. I wonder if Ayckbourn's reputation suffers a bit from his sheer, horrifying productivity (seventy-six of them - like the trombones), and also from the slightly trivial titles - Absurd Person Singular, Sisterly Feelings, Intimate Exchanges - which sound more like slightly naff newspaper headlines than major plays? For me, Absent Friends is not just funnier than most comedies, but - whisper it softly - a more penetrating portrait of marital despair than Arthur Miller's All My Sons. 

The one slight irritation I felt was that the Comedy Theatre has now been renamed the Pinter Theatre. Too many things are being named after people. We should start unnaming them. Kennedy Airport should go back to being Idlewild. I do hope the story is true that, when Pinter himself was lobbying for the name change, Tom Stoppard wrote to him saying: 'Wouldn't it be easier to change your name to Harold Comedy?' 

It must be true. It's in Wikipedia.

Everything can be pickled

We've been trying to get back to our Swedish roots - well, Sean's Swedish roots - by pickling things. It's so easy. You just heat vinegar and sugar and spices together and pour the liquid into the jars of whatever you're pickling. First came cucumbers with sprigs of dill (dill is the most Swedish ingredient that there is), now officially gherkins in their jars. A scrumptious green colour. Then came spiced beetroots, with star anise. Next, chillies - the last from our crop. But we still had brine left over - we started rooting round in the fridge and freezer for things to pickle. We've found some herrings. We've got some old-looking carrots - perfect. Radishes! The sharp crunch of them. And it feels so virtuous and thrifty, as if we're preparing ourselves for a long cold winter, instead of emerging into balmy spring.

For anyone who's interested, here's what you do for the gherkins: chop four cucumbers into fairly thick slices and pack them tightly into large jars with lots of springs of dill. Then bring 400g of caster sugar, one litre white wine vinegar, two and a half teaspoons of salt, the juice of two lemons and a tablespoon of whole peppercorns to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. When cool, pour into jars - and there it is. Ready to eat in two days.