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“[There are] three tribes of Mu-Ma Turks [who] have the custom of riding wooden horses to gallop over the [snow and] ice. Resting their feet on boards and supporting their armpits with crooked sticks, with one stride they travel a hundred paces.” Xin Tang Shu (New Tang History), c.AD600-900. [2]

“Polar exploration has two naturally defined necessities: skis and dogs… to achieve the best results, we must learn from the two primitive peoples who, through centuries of experience, have understood how to exploit these necessities: Lapps and Eskimos… I am inclined to believe that an adaptation of the Lapp kind of ski is the most useful type of polar ski, and the Eskimo dog an ideal companion on a polar expedition.”
Otto Sverdrup, Nyt Land, 1903, p.19 [3]

TO SET THE SCENE: It’s a hundred years and ten weeks now since Petty Officer Edgar Evans, 35, collapsed and died close to the lower end of the Beardmore Glacier, on the return march from the South Pole. Which was appalling blow to his four companions, but also a relief: his condition had deteriorated alarmingly, mentally and physically, in the month since the team found themselves forestalled at the South Pole. They well knew they could not drag a sick man 700-odd miles back to safety on the sledge; margins of safety were always slim, with food, fuel, warmer weather and time all set to run out soon. They sensed they were badly behind schedule, and beginning to fail: for Scott, writing in his journal the following day, Evans’s death was at once a terrible boon to his companions, and a stay of judgment. [4]

Nevertheless, when this same judgment fell on the survivors, some time in the final week of March, 1912, Evans’s “astonishing failure” — the “man whom we had least expected to fail” — was become one of the six or seven key reasons Scott gave for the disaster, in his famous Message to the Public: as was the “sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates”. Can we really excuse Scott responsibility for the condition of his own men, or accept it was an exogenous event impacting entirely unexpectedly on his decisions? But he had a way with words in a desperate situation, and was somehow this way able to disperse blame far out beyond himself, onto everyone and thus somehow no one.[5]

Four of the five in the polar party left journals, or fragments of same: though only Scott updated though to the very end.[6] But Evans wrote nothing that we know of, and we see him only though the eyes of others, not always kindly. We also see him in the photographs the British polar party took at the Pole, half a dozen carefully posed images we can’t not view through the lens of what we know is coming, that they still only fear: so poigant with hindsight, five men defeated and dejected, hungry, cold, exhausted, humiliated, anxious, doubtless angry too. And doomed.

Perhaps we tell ourselves we can see Evans (standing, right) has only a month left to him, in face and body language, both masked and unreadable; or indeed that Oates (standing, left, visibly favouring one leg[7]) has just two. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we can well see exactly what both most meant to mask, from those far away, who would only see photos, as much as from one another.

But our visceral connection to the known aftermath certainly massively shapes our sense of what’s shown and what’s not; especially when blanks so litter the telling of this tale. “Things going down-hill,” wrote Scott on 10 March, just days before the crippled Oates walked out of the tent in miserable agony. The Polar Party, wrote Apsley Cherry Garrard in his 1922 memoir The Worst Journey in the World were “going down-hill” (this not long after the Second Support Party left them and turned for home): ACG means it geographically — the polar plateau does indeed slope down from the Transantarctic Mountains to the Poles — but the echo is insecapably there for us, reading afterwards. Close-reading his companions’ journals for missed clues, ACG quilted a measured, complex, beautifully written record of the expedition, a portrait of fallen comrades that’s part apologia and nevertheless full, in its quiet-spoken way, of the grief and guilt and occluded rage of the survivor, accepting the collective blame of Scott’s Message — and yet not quite accepting it either. Before the PP even reached the pole, sometime between 4-10 January, “something happened” as ACG puts it: and the implication is that this something must be present in the journals he’s reading and quoting, a something barely grasped by their writers, a something resisted or denied. [8]

The journal-keepers were no longer alive to speak for themselves, and ACG himself made no accusations; laid no blame. What he does, piece by delicate piece, is set out the relevant material, to allow latterday readers to think through what went wrong and why. Clues there are, but rarely emphasised as such. And though anger flashes now and then, it’s easy to miss: “On the one hand [he writes in his summary chapter, 'Never Again'], Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day’s work of polar exploration…. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice.” [9]

At which point the anger somehow slides sideways — as ACG ruefully but unrelatedly admits how angry the Brits were at the time at Amundsen’s impertinent intrusion. Anger is something he’s ashamed of, or so he seems to feel and to be saying: Amundsen (of all people) of course bore no responsibility for Scott’s men’s death, and if it’s wrong to be angry with Amundsen, it’s wrong to be angry at all.

But it’s at this moment of comparison and contrast that full impassioned clarity emerges, just for a sentence or so, from ACG’s writing. And it would be a further 50-plus years before the implicit challenge was taken up: to tell the history of the two expeditions as a matter of contrast and comparison. Hence, in 1979, RH — to startled acclaim and undimmed controversy — turning orthodoxy on its complacent head, and retelling a tale of endurance, hardihood, sacrifice and what Scott called “unaccountable” bad luck as a miasma of inadequate knowledge, inadequate preparation and inadequate competence; an acid portrait of a moody leader unpopular with many of his team, improvising capriciously, out of his depth in a terrain that remained a whirling mystery to him to his last hour. RH, who speaks good Norwegian, has also scoured the surviving journals, for clues spoken and unspoken, noted and missed, to reveal two expeditions: one professionally tight with itself despite personal differences, intelligent and focused; and one in perpetual disarray, demoralised if not frightened, shadowed from the start by profound doubt and considerable mutual dislike.

Three important elements Huntford brings to LPoE and (30-odd years on) RSP: an aggressive forensic willingness to dig down beneath publicly declared team loyalty, to worry out elements diplomatically elided and fill in blanks; a sour shrewdness about what he repeatedly terms the “cross-currents” of conflicted human behaviour in groups; and (for a British writer) a likeably unusual Norwegophile admiration for Scott’s triumphant rival Roald Amundsen, who RH considers outrageously unpersoned in the routine British version before his intervention. RSP in particular is an unexpurgated edition of the journals of the rival leaders, organised so that day by day and date by date, the accounts of the journeys proper interlace and thus pass mutual comment. And importantly (though the book’s title obscures this) RSP weaves in a third account, in the form of a second Norwegian diary, that of cross-country ski champion Olav Bjaaland. Amundsen’s journal is plainer and far less discursive than Scott’s; Bjaaland’s, translated into English for the first time, provides an amused and often unimpressed sportsman’s counterpoint to his leader, just as Amundsen’s curts professionalism cuts across Scott’s writerly misdirections. These three take up the greater part of RSP, interrupted by occasional elucidatory harrumphs from editor RH, almost always at Scott’s expense: this all forms the central section, which is bracketed by focused contextualisation fore and aft, RH scornful restating his 1979 position, doubling down on very nearly all claims and anathemas; unapologetic and unimpressed by the various counter-arguments offered in the years since 1979. Amundsen he plainly still hugely admires, though by no means uncritically; and he still harbours a very lively anger at Scott, in person and as representative of a type and a mindset and of the cocooned society that so eagerly elected to canonise this dead explorer.

Anyway, the publication of RSP was what gave me the initial impulse to write all this, and — clear disclaimer here, as the RH line is sometimes contentious — my retelling is very much shaped by his, except where I explicitly say different. RH invariably fills blanks in to suit his anti-Scott agenda, when (by definition: blanks) the solid evidence isn’t there — but his instinct for where blanks actually are is a different, rather more interesting matter.

And as regards taking ACG’s challenge, and setting out the stories side-by-side, stage-by-stage and interwoven, purely as a formal structure, it really does do a surprising amount of Huntford’s work for him. Certainly it establishes key elements: that Amundsen was something of a genius, in the painstaking and imaginative depth of his preparation, and that Scott by contrast was always floundering, not only lacking in technical knowhow, but lacking too in the foresight or insight to recognise this; also that the story we imagined we knew depends all too crucially on omission if not suppression.

Less successful is the attempt by RH to establish that his burning contempt for Scott is morally justified, rather than mere accident of chemistry or tribal prejudice. The favoured RH structure gives him a handy rhetorical platform for the attempt, but the need for it is more symptom than reason — which is where my own obsession begins to play, I suspect.

TO ESTABLISH THE LARGER CONTRAST: the two leaders, who never met, headed very different types of projects. Agency, a wise man said, is far less important in any success than either luck or structure. Scott’s project was sprawling and confusedly ambitious, with portentous and often hubristic official and academic backing; Amundsen’s was focused and secretive, an embarrassment to his countrymen and supporters: he didn’t even tell his shipmates they were going South rather than North until they were halfway there.[10]

We have the luxury of hindsight; we know which team lost, and how catastrophically. To us, it’s quite plain whose the better mode of transport was: Amundsen’s (with Bjaaland at its head) a cross-country ski race with dogs, the Norwegian technique pioneered by the great explorer Nansen [11]; Scott’s an intricate plan combining experimental motorsleds, ponies (Shackleton’s unpromising innovation), dogs [12] and an immensely long slog of punishing man-power all across the polar plateau and back, down the Beardmore, and all the way home across the Barrier.[13] Since ponies can’t stand low temperatures that dogs can, Scott’s party started some time later than Amundsen’s, and the numbers alone show it falling further and further behind — and all too soon battling exhaustedly not to win a race but just to survive.

Hindsight Scott did not have, of course. He distrusted dogs — which he’d never seen run by those who knew how — and shipped in far too few to use as his primary sledge-power. We know — because ACG tells us — that Scott went into panic-mode for several days when he first learned of Amundsen’s presence (basecamp one degree further south, a party of expert skiers including Nansen’s former second-in-command, and fully 100 dogs). We know — because RH has astutely winkled this out — that no part of Scott’s plan shifted more confusingly and confusedly than the part relating to the dogs. The dogs themselves were taken farther than existing supplies really allowed — they didn’t reach the polar plateau but had a tough run back, their driver having to raid rations intended for others — and their orders for the following year changed so often (limping back from the South with their weary human messengers) that in the end literally no one knew what these orders actually were any more. By the time it mattered, the dying marchers were praying for their arrival with supplies and transport, the dogs were being rested back for projects the following year. No adequate supplementary dog rations had been laid in; the best dog driver had quit and gone home; and no one at base grasped that their beleaguered friends so desperately needed someone to come and rescue them. [15]

To win the pole — if the motors that Amundsen so feared didn’t deliver (and they didn’t) — the best British could hope for was that an accident in a crevasse or the like stopped the Norwegians; that Amundwen would discover no way up onto the plateau; or that his dogs couldn’t climb glaciers (it didn’t; he did; they could.)

Meanwhile: tents, clothes, goggles, ski-shoes, sledges and runners, containers, depots, cairns, way-markers — after a while the contrasts turn into a list[16], neatly effective solutions in one column, belated slap-dash improvisations in the other. Things small in themselves aggregated over days and months to give the Norwegians an enormous safety margin.

Secretive as he was, once Amundsen had let his team in on the secret of their own mission, he was also careful to place all his plans before them fully, tactics, strategy and route, for frank discussion and criticism. He needed them to trust in his leadership: he did this by trusting his team-mates to take their own safety and well being seriously.

Scott’s plan — unformed as it was until the depots were laid and half the ponies lost — remained opaque to his companions until it far too late. As intimations of disaster began to emerge, no one had a clue what steps to take. All knew, of course, that Norwegians were experts with ski and dogs, Nansen having pioneered the speedy effectiveness of this combo; faced with this, at least some of the British retreated to the stance that a technology aimed at speed and safety was to all intents and purposes cheating. [14: note to self and reader, footnotes now out of order -- sort later]

Scott, however — in a journal passage posthumously excised by his publishers — calls it a “miserable jumble”: as if to say mistakes were made, the passive-voice exculpation that all too often emerges after disasters. As even the inexperienced ACG recognised, Scott’s project was from the outset a sequence of hair-raising risks. As he cut corners with oil and food, he was spendthrift with his luck. Time and again, before the Polar journey even began, his men had had incredible (and undeservedly fortunate) escapes from serious harm or worse.[17]

Leaving no detail to chance, Amundsen was the opposite. He seemed to be stockpiling his fortune; narrowing the bounds of uncertainty to leave room for just two informed gambles: the location of his basecamp on the dangerously friable ice of the Barrier, and his certainty he would find a glacier to climb up through the Trans-Antarctic Mountains to the Polar Plateau. (All of which care offered Amundsen a certain grace when responding to his one lunatic improvisation, a near-disastrous error of judgment that turned out better than it ought, at least in the near-term.) [18]

In fact we’re using the word ‘luck’ in two distinct senses: Amundsen’s gambles, taken within a structured understanding of his environment; and the unexpected events that constantly assailed Scott, arising from his lack of a structured grasp of understanding of his situation. Which is a good point to start to switch the focus away from (so-called) agency, which merely compares of individuals (far-sighted intelligence versus fecklessness), and look closer at rival systems of thinking, attitude, knowledge. My belief is that the social border territory between competing systems is where anger like Huntford’s always lurks.

Let’s establish one key rivalry clearly and provocatively: here are two distinct species of science. Scott’s camp contained a physicist, three geologists, a meteorologist, two zoologists, and a parasitologist; three of these were also qualified doctors. The expedition was widely, well and deservedly praised for its published scientific studies and results: the scientists selected to accompany Scott were high-quality field researchers. This was Big Science; Imperial Science if you like: science that leads to and from Royal Societies, official, prestigious, charismatic, within its sternly policed disciplinary matrices both effective and fruitful. There was an official photographer also, and two motor engineers — all three pioneers of the technics of machinery in severe cold — plus the folks brought along to look after the horses and dogs. And lastly — at the worried Nansen’s urgent behest — a skiing instructor: Tryggve Gran. In this world of snow and ice, and anticipating a punishingly difficult 1,700 mile journey across it, the only practically knowledgeable person regarding ski was the camp’s youngster, just 22, a rich Norwegian playboy paying his way and (as some felt) not really pulling his weight. Certainly no Britons were adequately trained at his hand: as the Norwegians technicians sped ahead across the various surfaces, fast and slow, the British more than once despaired of their skis and depoted them, only to regret it when improved surfaces changed their minds, and go back and fetch them.

Amundsen’s expedition made no claim to be science-led. He planned to get to the Pole first, fast and safely, taking only such magnetic readings as aided his quest and proved his claims. The closest to a qualified doctor was Amundsen himself, who’d dropped out of medical school in his first year. Nonetheless, this too is science: the focused science of swift and safe polar travel in the age before the motor was adapted to the climate; the gathered science — from folk wisdom and practical fact in half a dozen northern cultures, from the Finns to the Inuit — of the many states of snow itself, when these could be expected, how they behaved and how you coped. [19]

This is a deliberately contrary definition of “science”, of course: and the flash of irritation the contrariness maybe sparks marks exactly the borderwar I’m most interested in. On one side: the narrow and local and specialist knowledge and technique, perhaps transmitted by word of mouth and folk nostrums and experience in the field (snowfield; icefield). On the other: academic papers and peer review, official qualifications and credentials and graded centralised exams, with codified beginner courses that can be absorbed in a class-room. Little of what Scott needed to know to survive was yet woven tidily into any established or institutionalised Big Science discipline. Nor was a sense of this lack part of the ordinary knowledge of the imperial metropole he came from. Gran aside, the closest the British had to an expert in the science of polar travel was Scott himself, whose furthest south with Discovery in 1901–04 had been a riskily chaotic scurvy-ridden scramble. The notion that cultures adapted to the cold might have knowledge worth examining doesn’t appear to have occurred to Scott: thus the purblind complacency of Imperial Science in a nutshell — the natives within or beyond imperial boundaries were to be studied and exploited as resources, never consulted or respected as equals.[20]

Amundsen didn’t think like this at all. He had made thorough and intelligent study of every single relevant aspect of life, travel and survival in the snows. He’d read everything available, and thought hard about it: clothing and food, means of transport, modes of equipment, facts, rumours and myths about the region and its equivalents in the north. He’d pored over accounts of European and American expeditions, successful or otherwise, and (crucially) made intelligent study of the expertise of the peoples who lived in or hard by the polar regions, the Lapps and the tribes in Siberia, whose minds and skills he trusted; he’d already been on two invaluable expeditions — as first mate on the chaotic Antarctic expedition in the Belgica in 1897-99, and as captain of the Gjøa when it traversed the Northwest Passage in 1903-06. On the former he saw scurvy and madness; on the latter he spent two invaluable years living with the Netsilik Inuit studying dog-sledging and polar clothing, gleaning his wisdom from the people whose everyday lives depended on getting such matters right, every time they left shelter.

Amundsen wasn’t right about everything: Big Science already knew a scatter of relevant things he didn’t. But centralised institutions of knowledge inevitably carry with them complex hierarchies of authority and irrelevant slabs of self-interested preconception — and like all theory, Big Science is slow-moving and conservative. In the crucial adaptive space — how to keep himself and his men alive in the urgent moment — Amundsen’s very precise “uncredentialed” expertise, combined with the shape of the group he fashioned round this type of thinking and acting, was as superior as was his transport.

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SAID: In November 1912 the search party found Scott’s tent buried in drift just 11 miles south of One Ton Camp. The first terrible astonishment: how could they perish so close to safety? The second: just three bodies lay within, not five. Scott lay in the centre, Bowers (“Birdie”) to his right, Wilson (“Bill”) to his left, head to the door. “Bill especially had died very quietly with his hands folded over his chest,” wrote ACG in his own journal, the same day the bodies were discovered: “Birdie also quietly.” Bowers and Wilson lay as if asleep in their bags, while Scott had thrown open the flaps of his and opened his coat, his hand outstretched across Wilson — but beyond this he would not “try and put down what there was in that tent.” Scott had died last, of this he insisted he was certain; left in the air is the suggestion that Scott had not died quietly. (Gran, in the same rescue party, was more forthcoming in his journal and memoirs: noting the glassy yellowness of their frostbitten faces, he says that Scott “seemed to have fought hard at the moment of death…”)[21]

Time was pressing; the search party itself was in no position to dally. No post mortem, just the swiftest examination of scene and bodies by expedition surgeon Atkinson (never officially written up), then tent let down over the three, and all evidence but diaries and letters buried with them.

“I feel sure that he had died the last”: in 1922, this is ACG’s fond grieving recognition of a colleague’s stamina. A half-century later, and this generous gracenote of subjectivity had apparently become a partyline. RH was researching at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the mid-70s, as he told a Guardian interviewer a few years ago: “They were reframing Wilson’s last letter and we found some instructions in pencil from Bowers on the back… The implication of this was clear: it was Bowers, not Scott, who was the last to die. The academic’s response to this was to say ‘This is the sort of thing that should be locked away in a bank vault and not revealed for 50 years.’ Facts should not be allowed to injure a national hero. After that, I learnt to be discreet about what I was doing.” [22]

There’s no way we’ll ever now know the answer to this quite minor question — in LPoE, RH actually places this same pencil note on the reverse of one of Scott’s last letters, not Wilson’s and makes no open mention of the unnamed academic and his fatwa — but it is a curious loose end right in the middle of the official legend. It’s no great surprise that an unexamined incident-scene throws up contradictory explanations — but why are the loose ends being kept tidied away? As I say, however he glosses them, RH has a nose for the blanks that beg explanation.

Scott’s family read the drafts of LPoE and exploded with shocked hurt and fury, and unsuccessfully went to court to stop publication. Doubtless they came to see this as a mistake: they made a foe of a diligent and intelligent scholar with an unparalleled grasp of the relevant material, who they will certainly have concluded was also a grudge-harbouring monomaniac. It’s pretty hard not to admire how waspishly well RH works the gaps and gulfs between Scott’s unpublished journals and their final public form. In both LPoE and RSP, all posthumous edits are restored; not to say, laboriously emphasised.[23]

What was considered decently printable in the Edwardian era, a reticent and an anxious decade, is very different from what we routinely today expect to be allowed to read, of course. Expedition survivors were physically shattered and emotionally traumatised — and the world they all knew was about to explode into a war beyond anyone’s imagination. The pain and grief of surviving family or friends were very much not things to be trifled with, and the pruning of Scott’s disappointed impatience with this or that expedition member was as much a diplomatic kindness as a distorting untruth — at least in the immediate aftermath.

But not everyone needed their feelings protecting. Scott’s crewman from the Discovery days, Shackleton, now a bitter rival, was alive and healthy and only too well aware that Scott had not loved him. In several passages referring to Shackleton’s 1907 polar bid, RH uncovers a crankishly dismissive scorn on Scott’s part — were these excised because they leave the latter looking petty, or worse?

Intriguing as such excisions are — and thrilling to any historian — all are minor: their reinstatement re-calibrates our sense of a complex man not universally loved, in an age era when plaster saints impress no one. But one omission is very different. And here was certainly a closing of ranks, a cover-up on a dead man’s behalf, as well as the wreck of the expedition’s claim to honour — if, that is, it was genuinely a project dedicated above all to science.

THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK IN THE BLIZZARD: the missing word is “scurvy”, and (to be fair) and ACG uses it several times in The Worst Journey in the World. He just doesn’t use it when it most needs using. He describes Dr Atkinson’s winter lecture on it. He quotes Lashly’s journal entries, when Lt Edward Evans nearly died of it on the SSP.[24] He notes (twice) that — when they knew the Polar party would not return — Lashly was certain scurvy was to blame; and that Atkinson disagreed (though not why he disagreed). Both had helped save Lt Evans’s life [25] — and Atkinson, the senior officer in charge after Scott’s failure to return and Lt Evans’s collapse, would insist in November that the search party took with them raw onions — he would not have done this if scurvy wasn’t a concern.

But then WJitW arrives among the bodies, and the urgent question vanishes. Nor is it to be found in ACG’s analysis of the reasons of the disaster. What’s going on here?

Scurvy is a deficiency disease, caused by lack of vitamin C, which the human body cannot synthesise. If vitamin C is absent from the diet for much more than three months, the following progession of symptoms appear: lethargy, spots, paleness, depression, spongy gums, bleeding from mucous membranes, partial paralysis, suppurating wounds, loss of teeth, jaundice, fever, neuropathy and finally death.

However, vitamins were unknown to official science when the Scott and Amundsen expeditions embarked: the experiments that isolated and identified them were little known and still underway in 1910. And by a quirk of fashion, orthodox scientific thinking in the Edwardian era was hostile to the notion of deficiency disease. Atkinson’s winter lecture had declared scurvy a product of tainted food, a toxicity avoidable via careful food preparation, and this was the mainstream view. Nansen himself, scientist and explorer, was venomously opposed to the very notion of deficiency disease.

The symptoms of scurvy were well enough known to sailors like Lashly — as were the classic preventatives, fresh fruit (especially lemons or limes), fresh vegetables, fresh meat. Nomadic Arctic peoples knew better too: seal meat and cloudberries not only kept scurvy at bay on long journeys, and quickly cured it when it appeared. Amundsen had seen just this on the Belgica; and had certainly discussed it with the Netsilik Inuit too. Neither expedition ate a balanced scientific diet in the modern sense: but Amundsen’s was informed by Inuit knowledge and his own experience. (And making his luck and reducing his risk as always, he anyway planned to be out in the field for no more than 10 weeks; Scott’s journey could never have been completed in much less than twice this.)

At the time of their respective expeditions, neither Amundsen nor Scott could know the first thing about Vitamin C — it wasn’t even isolated yet, let alone named. But ACG was writing in 1922; vitamin C’s role in scurvy was accepted, and the concept of deficiency disease back in good standing. Big nutritional science had swung right back in behind despised folk wisdom. And we know ACG knows this: because he discusses it, in a late footnote. We also know Atkinson had been thinking about it: first, the raw onions for the search party, and second, ACG mentions that he had had the size and contents of the rations quietly re-examined in the years since the disaster.

More to the point, both had seen the bodies in the tent, which were in (wrote ACG) a “terrible state”; he is not a man given to lazy hyperbole; the word “terrible” has a considered force here.

Scott has justification here: official science was very wrong about scurvy, and he was in no strong position to revolt against officialdom. But Scott’s chroniclers don’t have this excuse. This was a scientific expedition; if the condition was present in the bodies as found, science required it be recorded; and if it was not present — somewhat miraculously, given the circumstances — science requires this be noted too. Atkinson, ACG and were honour-bound to discuss its presence OR absence; and if unable to explain what they found, then honour-bound to say what needed explanation and outlay questions arising.

I said that the word doesn’t appear when ACG analyses the disaster. This is true, but it’s not quite the whole truth, perhaps. Another blank to fill in: in his closing pages, ACG explores three contributory reasons. Unlike Scott, he doesn’t blame anyone’s physical condition, citing instead a lack of oil, unexpectedly bad weather, and (at length) the rations.

Oil and weather we’ll leave to the footnotes [26]: the food is the matter of the tale. We know how things turned out; we know that folk-scientific Amundsen guessed right, and Scott badly. Summing up, ACG first moves doggedly through quantity and make-up of rations, on the barrier and on the summit: he knows, because he was eating it, and man-hauling on it, that just in terms of protein, carbohydrate and fat, it was wrongly adjusted. Everyone lost weight, strength and underlying fitness; everyone felt cold and hungry; lessons that should have been learned from the Winter Journey were in fact not learned [27]. He notes that Atkinson had independently been puzzling at the same issue.

And then ACG does quite a curious thing: rather than summing up, he throws the discussion wide open, with a last-minute typographical intervention of his own devising, as it were. He inserts a long footnote about vitamins (in my crumbly dawn-of-time Penguin edition still spelled “vitamines”), and this footnote — by virtue of page layout alone — draws our attention. No way to prove this is a strong unspoken hint, of course, about where historians-to-come ought to look. He still doesn’t mention scurvy — but I can’t see how a 1922 reader versed in the relevant science can’t be thinking scurvy. [28]

DISLIKE IS MUNDANE; HATRED IS INTERESTING: your own everyday reaction against the tiresome flaws of others is easily justified, and rarely all that important. Unexamined loathing, however apparently justified the catalyst, is your own weaknesses mastering you: it’s a giveaway, a tell. It’s natural enough for biographers to find themselves trapped in intimate and unveiled association with someone whose choices and mannerisms, beliefs and failings, they find over time they can’t really stand. And there’s no reciprocity with the dead: they will never adapt to the scholar’s sensibilities, can’t turn on the charm and soothe jangled nerves.

Probably the RH aversion to Scott is undisguised enough that it works a kind of self-innoculation: nothing is being snuck in, that’s for sure, and readers can easily push back against it, readdressing the evidence more sympathetically.

But Huntford is intensely sensitised to bad group chemistry, so perhaps there’s an aspect of his own allergy which bothers him a little. Does he feel he needs to justify his animus? Does it seem a bit much even to him? Certainly in both LPoE and RSP he nudges now and then towards speculations so extreme that even his most convinced readers likely recoil a bit. Somewhat different speculations in each book, and small moments both times — but telling; some might say damaging.

In LPoE, three men arrive arrive at their last camp: “Scott’s right foot had been frostbitten, and he was almost unable to walk. Now he was the drag on the party, and in the predicament of Oates. Wilson and Bowers, in marginally better shape, prepared to set off for the depot and fetch food and fuel. Something stopped them; it is not clear what.” [29]

This highlights a genuine mystery, a blank that needs filling: the two-man depot-march is indeed announced in Scott’s journal, but we never discover why it didn’t happen. RH chooses to imply that Scott had some strange hold over in his men, shutting off their natural survival instinct. He’s also implicitly sharpening a contrast: Oates had stumbled off into a blizzard, to free up rations and remove his companions’ responsibility to stick with him to the end. Only a few days later, Scott’s companions are persuaded to remain at his side, and all three starve.

But why would they not stay? Even starving and exhausted, they had deep affection for Scott; deepened, in fact, by shared adversity, even if they also held him entirely responsible for this adversity. RH himself seems to consider Scott so intensely dislikeable that any loyalty can only be a deluded hivemind etiquette at most, evolving into a species of group-protective corruption. But we all of us have affection for difficult and ambiguous people, which stressed situations often heightens… [30]

In RSP, 30 years later, this line of speculation — prominent in LPoE by virtue of its placing at the climactic moment — has vanished. What replaces it requires a link be intuited between two comments many pages apart. On page 30, when Scott first discovers Amundsen is in the Antarctic, and likely to beat him, the RH gloss on the inadequate British preparation that followed is this: “Scott continued with his declared pretence that Amundsen did not exist. Anyway, he knew that if he did not succeed, he might still be forgiven a ‘glorious failure’.” [31]

Some 280 pages later, with Amundsen feted globally and Scott’s whereabouts unknown, RH writes as follows: “Until then, Amundsen was regarded as the natural victor, while Scott was in the process of being dismissed as the loser. Scott’s ruin now reversed the roles, which poses the question of whether it had been premeditated.” [32]

The idea on p.30 is standard-issue sourness at the Brit love of a goofy loser: Eddie the Eagle-ism, a trait RH has no patience with. But where do we go when we conjoin it with the word “premeditated”? Coming second is one (unavoidable but spinnable) thing; when was ruin premeditated? At what point could Scott have intuited — and what an intuition! — that “ruin” might reverse the roles, and when could such a realisation meaningfully have been acted on? The key depots — most significantly One Ton — were already established. Various belated and risky improvisations notwithstanding [26], Scott’s overall plan was always both intricate and inflexible, with next to no give built in: by the time the British discovered Amundsen had poled first, and barring deliberate dawdling, the character of the home journey was entirely determined. [26a]. It was also a pitiless race for survival: is RH really arguing that Scott intended it to be such, and that Bowers signed off on the entire pre-trip prep not seeing this (or not minding)?

Or just that Scott was confident that gamely struggling losers would always have a place in John Bull’s big fat heart? That he knew he was well beaten before he even began — hence the mental crisis ACG describes — and thus set things up to ensure a suitably glamorous and romantic struggle for second place, against seemingly insuperable odds? Odds that turned out genuinely insuperable.

What about a subconscious death-wish? A friend jumped at this notion: “Of course! a death-wish is part of anyone’s make-up that repeatedly places themselves in high-risk situations!” And to her, this was very likely also a source of Huntford’s rage: as she knows from personal experience, there’s a self-absorbed arrogance to risktakers, especially when their stunts blithely endanger others. (Certainly it matters a lot to RH that Shackleton, no one’s idea of a cautious fellow, always showed scrupulous care towards his men, and lost none that he directly oversaw in two very high-risk enterprises.)

But she had also homed cleverly in on something I’d overlooked; that Scott’s a better writer than Huntford. Or perhaps better say better stylist — where RH has something of an ex-journalist’s bad instinct for the first laziest phrasing, Scott had a superb sense of evocative pacing and what people need to read to begin to find amusement in the explorer’s technical gaffes and carelessness, his parochial conceit, his all-too entitled sense of a world that needs to organise itself for his convenience. It’s possible that Scott’s facility with words really rankles with Huntford, the gentleman amateur besting the meticulous professional; and when this is combined even with the suggestion that Scott had (unconsciously?) engineering a better drama by skimping supplies and cutting corners, and that he had fashioned himself an admiring and uncritical audience by the means of best-quality storytelling, well, we’ve maybe arrived at the irrational and all-consuming heart of a wounded amour propre. In the uneasy borderlands between competing disciplines, rival ethics chafe one another as feverishly as the most threatened modes of partisan politics, or indeed stand-in quasi-politics. My friend knows me pretty well: when irrational passions emerge in disputed cultural or disciplinary neighborhoods, when attitudes rational in themselves deliver themselves embattled, this is when my ears prick up.

SO IS THERE AN ACTUAL REAL POLITICS IN ALL THIS?: ever since LPoE appeared, Scott’s defenders have tried to impugn Huntford’s credentials by accusing him of mere fashionable political bias.[34] Here’s an aggressively anti-establishment Empire-mocking Norwegian-speaking enthusiast for the Lappish or Inuit world-view: the man has to be some kind of lefty, his attack merely typical of the pinko tendency in the 70s to decry all things British, no?

They could hardly be more wrong (or sillier): RH has never been slow to announce his admiration for Margaret Thatcher and his revulsion at all things socialist, his disgusted contempt for the thuggish collective as it smothers individual enterprise and vision, the state as it curdles into self-interested self-expansion.[35]

All the same, he’s no parochial conservative; as a Briton he’s unusually fond of Norway. His (very engaging) history of skis, Two Planks and a Passion, is obliquely also a history of Norway’s struggle for throw off Swedish overlordship (as is much of his biography of the explorer Nansen), as a sympathetic chronicler of the road to independence, he’s often highly critical of the emerging nation’s backwoods timidity, and sees the flaws and limitations within the liberating energies (he’s an Ibsen fan). What little time he has for Empire is a more a boyish fondness for its long-vanished buccaneering days — he compares Amundsen to Drake at one point — and he’s actively and relentlessly angry at that element in the imperial mindset that patronises and ignores local knowledge and native skills. Nor does he admire tradition simply because it’s tradition — 2P&P is a complex study of the materialist dialectics of innovation, to put it in a way that would annoy him greatly.[36]

He is no uncomplicated admirer of capitalism. Early in RSP, for example, he contrasts Amunden’s mindset with Scott’s. Scott he thinks a thoroughly conventional British naval officer, embedded in and dependent on imperial-military class rigidities; Amundsen was the “antithesis of Scott’s hierarchical discipline and today’s corporate mentality” [37, my italics]. He seems greatly to distrust the idea of “theory” — the word operates in his prose as the diktat-from-the-centre that blinds and blocks the lesser agent in the field. And he perhaps distrusts idealism even more; politically successful idealists he largely dismisses as power-hungry hypocrites.

So what to call him? Tory anarchist? But he’s really not an anarchist, and (as a self-declared Thatcherite) I slightly suspect he’d argue Thatcher‘s more pathbreaker than Tory. Radical individualist? Certainly there’s a tinge of the Nietzschean here (with more than a dash of Nietzsche’s sourly delicate sensitivity towards the psychological tangles of seemingly respectable social intercourse). He detests what he calls “sterile uniformity”, whether imposed by the state or by mass manufacture — or indeed by what I’ve been calling Big Science. He’s drawn to people whose path takes them away from the ordinary; and fascinated by how groups interract internally. To quarantine Amundsen’s success from the taint of crime of “collectivism”, he introduces the notion of the Virtuoso Team, and systematically contrasts such a formation with the ill-informed Polar amateurism he sees dominating Scott’s outlook and projects.

What spurs Huntford’s animus is his investment in certain convictions about expertise and its refinement, how best to combine variant strands, to process and scale up, to exploit without destroying.[39: footnotes out of order] This is a politics of the betterment of knowledge: he aligns himself with Thatcher because he’s convinced this betterment is best favoured by her reforms; or rather, most threatened by her opponents and enemies and the interests they represent.

Which will seem utterly contradictory to many. And requires (since it’s the tangle at the root of what draws me to this story, and to Huntford’s extreme take on it) a digression, into my own semi-formulated theory about the conflicting dynamics of rival systems of knowledge within a modern market economy.

Because I don’t actually think class politics (as we ordinarily understand the word politics) well explains Huntford’s anger. And to explain why, I need to propose a type of social category that cuts down through the horizontal layers of economic class: my term for this being tranche (because tranche is French for “slice”, and everyone knows intellectual jargon must be in French, clerical Latin or fake Greek: and slice because economic class is kind of like a layer cake, and I need categories that slice vertically down through the recognised class layers).

What I want to explore — and I’m aware this is the heavily contested territory of politicised experts, with me setting out onto a high and airless ice plateau with nothing but amateur equipment of my own devising — is the politics of partial information; and more explicitly the generalised paranoias of rival modes of partial information. [new footnote here: re cake and class and rival theories]

Now as noted, the British Empire in the Edwardian era repels Huntford, not least for for the conformist and class-bound stickiness of its institutes of knowledge; but also (and seemingly at odds with this) for the “British cult of the gentleman amateur”, a ideology of comfortable know-nothing complacency that makes a virtue of its own belated improvisations and lack of planning; a “common sense” empiricism that tends to manifest as insouciant amusement towards any technical matrix of disciplinary knowledge. [38: footnotes out of order] And to sterotype and generalise the RH bete noir: it’s the bad dynamics of large institutions, and how they fail to scale up the close observation and subtlety of understanding he associates with individualism (or anyway Virtuoso Teams).

A tranche is a social structure organised to develop and nurture and protect values, perspectives and skills that seem overlooked or under threat in society at large. Formal examples of tranches would be professional associations and institutions (legal or medical or military), guilds and unions and the like; less formally perhaps, there’d be art movements and magazines readerships and hobbygroups and fanclubs, from modernists to metalheads, from trainspotters to Beliebers, plus — not so different, rhetoric notwithstanding — the many identity-pol quasi-nations (the “Black Nation”, the “Queer Nation”), and of course all the many conflicted factions of actual official political and-or religious parties and groupings and movements and sects. A tranche (in my definition) is really ANY structure dedicated to the defence of values those self-selecting to gather in its defence (and within its community) consider essential, and vulnerable. Tranches — by this definition — come in many rival forms and internal sutrctures, the rivalry itself often the generator of this variation of form and structure.

In economic class warfare, the direction of battle is primarily up or down (the haves against the have-nots). In tranche warfare, as often as not, the conflicts are lateral. Whatever else it is, a tranche is a temple to partial information: a social space in which the specific local expertise will often seem to function as the dominant ideology.

Twentieth-century politics was dominated by variations of the Bismarckian technocratic state: for all their war-causing differences, one thing was common to the decaying and embattled 19th-century imperialisms, as well as the USSR, the USA, and the many smaller social-democratic regimes. This was a commitment to managerialist systems of planning. Until the 60s, these otherwise very different models of societies shared one assumption — that a better world could be created by a well educated, well intentioned centralised ruling class running everything in the interests of those not so fortunate. Vast political conflict arose over the machineries by which this class was selected and arrived at this role, by which it recognised and realised itself. Significant conflict too over what constituted the interests of all not within this class: and how (and whether) these interests merited concern. Yet beneath the implacable conflict there was a sinister measure of agreement.

By the 60s, challenge to this model was massing everywhere; in anti-colonial peasant nationalisms, in a surge of anti-Moscow marxisms, in a youth revolt across Europe and the Anglophone world (a revolt that aonxiously combined America’s stubborn don’t-step-on-me culture of individualism with a mushrooming of incompatible varieties of identity politics).

And another challenge too, from an unexpected, very anti-liberal quarter: a very opaque, ambiguous, very strong and ambitious mode of resistance to the notion of social transformation imposed and administered from above. It was formulated by the conservative pro-market economist Friedrich von Hayek and his followers (including Margaret Thatcher, of course); Hayek arguing, with sly vigour, that the localised knowledge essential for the understanding of (and thus efficient practical use of) this or that concrete phenomenon or social activity was by definition ungraspable in its full necessary detail by any centralised state elite, any inflexible Bismarckian bureaucracy whatever its political complexion. And thus that the judgments and decisions made at the centre — to whatever political end — would always tend to smother the skills needed to value a practice or a produce, and the quick-shifting facts necessary for informed and rational. The vast dispersed detail of this knowledge — available to no single agent in the nexus — was all too easily smothered, even in the best-intentioned overarching statistical generalisation of a centralised decision process. The interplay of detailed partial local intelligence (and desire), the interplay that fosters innovation and delivers focused satisfaction to those looking for it, will always be distorted and effaced.

Free markets, by contrast, allow the “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” to be aggregated in a readable and a useable way: the market’s ordinary pricing mechanism captures, codes and communicates all the types of information that mutually distant participants in the overall exchange need to know. What the free market allows is an speedread shared index of value that reflects and passes on, with immense and efficient swiftness, the corollary of the local judgment and knowledge of the factory-manager or merchant on the spot, without having to slather it in all the semi-relevant and irrelevant information-as-noise these judges have had to engage with.

A rational central evaluator will always still have to process such information (all the information there is, relevant or otherwise); the market (in this model) is essentially a vast interlocking system of shortcuts that allow everyone entering it to operate effectively, within a vast miasma of unavoidably partial information (against the swirling background of the imagined ideal of total information).

Thus Hayek: who I cite not because I agree with him politically (at all), but because he raises a question that surely needs answering whatever your politics. Partial knowledge is a conundrum that every conceivable society and any economy will have to confront: to transmit information by other means (be these statistical or descriptive) than by face-to-face encounter, or trade, is to risk the obliteration of local (especially tacit) knowledge and small-focus expertise, and to render value itself hugely vulnerable. Radical alternatives to the system-as-is are proposed all the time: but most (not all) arrive pre-infested with the same old modernist-managerial pseudo-rationalism of the central-committee-to-come. In tranche-warfare terms, the fundamentalist insistence that if only all society were reorganised exactly to the precepts this or that little dissident sect proposes, the problem of resource distribution in the face of unknowable information will simply vanish, the mechanism of such vanishment to emerge at a later date (and only reactionaries doubt or fear our motives or vision or capabilities…)

But having outlined a genuine (and a universal) conundrum, Hayek must now demonstrate that his favoured system, this unconstrained and undistorted ideal of the free-market pricing system, is not only perfect for the conveyance of the types of aggregated partial value he outlines (which are those that can be uncontroversially monetised), but is in no way an an active harm to the the transmission and protection of every other kind of value.

And actually his essay — famous as it is — really doesn’t even begin to attempt this. All we get are dodges: a speculative elision, a risibly sketchy survey of all rival wings of economic analysis, and in conclusion a mildly trivial nitpick aimed at fellow economist Joseph Schumpeter: that the partial knowledge imparted by price does not and cannot mean that consumers have magically imparted to them (as what Schumpeter apparently calls a “datum”) all the information of content and provenance that has, in the ordinary course of the market process, been sheared away. [39a]

The irony being that Schumpeter’s alleged silly error actually mirrors Hayek’s: not only does most of the complex of shifting information compressed and simplified into cost-price remain invisible at the price-paying end of the extended exchange; any information and evaluation that can’t be well signalled by the assignment of price is also rendered invisible.[39b]

And — to return to Amundsen versus Scott — such unmonetisable modes of information and evaluation are far from unusual (in fact they’re extremely common). In his 2001 introduction to Herbert Ponting’s The Great White South, Huntford says that it’s a “paradox” that the Norwegian victory produced a single book; where Scott’s failure no less than seven (to which can be added Ponting’s silent film documentary The Great White Silence). Huntford seethes at the obliteration of Amundsen’s achievement, as the two expeditions competed for mass mediation. But such obliteration — and such resentment — are surely exactly what tranche-warfare would teach us to expect, as lateral struggles within the information market play out. The occlusion of Amundsen’s story and the rise to heroic myth of Scott’s catastrophe is, very precisely, a example of the destruction by the market of certain modes of value and tacit knowledge. The value of Amundsen’s triumph — if by this we mean the compacted geometry of site-specific virtuoso expertise and the solutions his victory represented — was never going to be a value that the market, in 1912 or after, could recognise, scale up or exploit.

And while piratical self-motivation is undoubtedly an element in Amundsen’s story — the explorer as Viking raider — a merely uncritical Thatcherite admiration for entrepreneurship seems rather to miss the point. Amundsen was hopeless with money. He needed it badly but never made any: when he found sponsors to bail him out, they had to be satisfied not with profit (ever), but with the faraway mountains and glaciers that today bear their names [39c]. At the centre of a vast inhospitable frozen desert, the pole is a horrible place. The plain fact of the Polar Victory is that, in itself and as it is, it couldn’t directly be monetised: the commodification of the romance of unspoiled isolation can only ever mean the despoliation of both, via high-number tourism and/or mineral extraction. [39c2]

Stories, though: these can be sold (and might even somewhat protect the beauty of the landscape). But from a historian’s perspective, the better historical story is rarely the more saleable story: and (in the angry RH gloss), Scott’s account is a well written muck of sentimentality, mendacity, indifference or worse towards professional expertise, amused anit-historical indifference towards those foreigners (modern and ancient) who best understood the terrain, and a baffled contempt for any who declined to conform to complacent Edwardian convention. In other words, Scott gave his Empire readership exactly what RH believes they anyway craved: vicarious adventure, an enduring image of gutsily indomitable Brits at their best in a pinch, the affirmation of everything they already believed in. Any pointed questions could be smothered in shroud-waving, or a flurry of busy salutes to the flag of higher scientific purpose.

Amundsen — as his journals show — was a guardedly plain writer who refuses to gin up adventure where none was to be had. The tragedy of his occlusion can probably be summarised like this: you rarely get great copy out of a job well done. No “arc” and no “journey”, as the script-doctors would say — and not much “learning” either. By long planning and precise focus, Amundsen had made himself the master scientist of comfortable life and travel on the ice in the pre-petrol-engine age. His polar victory was a straightforward practical task very tidily executed (the very tidiness had a genius to it, but by its nature a tidiness of genius is always going to be self-effacing). And the difficulties he overcame will only prickle the nape of fellow scientists ( in the faintly contrarian sense I’m using the word here) — and this species of fellow scientist had been doomed by the arrival in the Antarctic of motor travel. Air travel and ship-to-ship radio were both on the historical horizon. The moment of Amundsen’s victory was the vanishment of the technique he perfected; an entire school rendered irrelevant overnight by its own triumph.

“Rendered irrelevant” is not an unsaleable story — but surely not one Amundsen had the mind to deliver. And manoeuvring in secret to steal the prize from under the nose of the foolish posh kids for the big stupid Empire, Amundsen had also stripped out the angle of the sporting upset: with the best will in the world, a single unrepeatable event is only a good pitch if you can present it as a public contest, and Amundsen left this too late. As a writer, he was no dramatist: the genuine achievement of reaching the pole first, its techniques, its lessons, its meaning — its value — did not find its storyteller for decades; and even this storyteller had to construct the drama within a larger juxtaposition, complete with overdrawn cartoon villain. Needing a hit to establish his career, RH (at least from my perspective) denies himself the more subtle, far more interesting moral-political drama, about the information that can’t survive the market’s cull, and how this impacts on Scott’s story, and Amundsen’s, and his own.

Which are more popular? Stories that conform to established conventions — of the doughty pluck and selfless heroism of “our boys” for example — or tales of skilled technicians taking unruffled care of business. The term ‘story-teller’ is hardly one of unalloyed approval — isn’t that fish you caught getting bigger and more of a fighter every time we hear of it? — but a story’s usefulness is only related in the most complex way to its truthfulness. Fiction vastly outsells fact, and we can tidy this unsettling statistic away into moralism in any smug direction we like — it’s our anxiety at being fooled by art that draws us to artists who die for their art. We read for struggle and conflict, for vicarious experience of extremes, for inspiration, to imagine ourselves more marvellous than we know we are, to confront ourselves in places we’d never dare go. Huntford thinks the victory-defeat switch is a paradox; but isn’t it really just a cliche? Albeit a very deep and strange cliche.

And science is as vulnerable as anything else once you move beyond its grand generalised narrative of progress. To turn it into popular stories, don’t you have to glamourise and distort? To favour conflict and daring breakthrough over patient routine and detailed exploratory uncertainty? Isn’t there a sharp tension between readers feel they want in the fields of information, education and science, and what they may actually need? Who gets to decide here, and how? [39d] Just as the free-market pricing system can hide ugly social facts about the production deep in the sheared-off “partial knowledge”, the mass dissemination of complex ideas can occlude or elide unpopular and unsaleable information essential to the evaluation of superfically popular or saleable claims. Good scientists in their role as scientists will know to hunt this hidden material out; but scientists rarely fund most of their own research, and the phenomenon of funders choosing to be ill-informed is hardly rare. Is there any evidence whatever that the free market encourages or supports scholarly research for its own sake, let alone the painstaking and scrupulous winkling out of disliked facts? Can RH argue the zigs and zags into and out of fashionability of his own conclusions about Scott — not to mention the disinclination of his critics to engage with the rich contradictory complexity of his material — are somehow not also artefacts of the information market as it actually exists? (This may come across as a rhetorical gotcha: actually I genuinely don’t know what RH believes is going on here, though he adverts to it darkly a couple of times…)

THE COMMODIFICATION OF A WIN AS THE REDEFINITION OF VICTORY: monetisable value is hugely privileged over any other species of value in a modern market economy. Other values are downgraded, sidelined, silenced, ignored: whenever you encounter the word “commodification” used in a negative or critical sense, you’re reading something that assumes some such argument (often, it’s true, extremely vaguely and confusedly). The effect of commodification — which so simplifies exchange in certain helpfully ways — is to shut whole layers of value out of any possible discussion.

To expand this a little: commodification is not simply the process of assigning an exchange price, to speed and improve transfer of materials or services, from source to use-point, in a particular trade. Or rather, the assigning of price is a far from simple process; certainly not a process with simple agency. Commodification is the insertion of any individual act of exchange into an all-emcompassing network of the deployment and interpretation of all the many many chunks of partial information, inheriting and accepting (as it were) values and prices assigned elswehere, far away, over the horizon of vendor’s and vendee’s immediate experience, knowledge or comprehension.

And once our particular exchange places us within the larger system of commodification — invaluable as it seems for the transmission of certain kinds of value — all these focused skills, this knowledge, expertise, wisdom, this entire dimension of human endeavour, become hugely vulnerable. The danger is — the fact is — that the ease with which the extant system processes value type A, in contrast to the evident difficulties it has with value type B, ensures that the “unfettering” of this system, the better to serve value type A, has (as unintended consequence, or not so unintended) the inevitable degradation of value type B; its rendering inoperable in public (which is to say political) discussion.

A tranche will form as easily round value type A as type value B: in both cases (in the society we actually live in) to beef up the degree to which the market (recognised as the primary vector of value across the entire culture) acknowledges either type as it adherents believe it should be. If the market is deemed incapable of properly recognising or valuing or respecting a value, a tranche will form: round any product or practice or idea or way of life that the market isn’t trusted to deliver or to leave unspoiled.

And the nervous system of any given tranche is thus a paranoid system: paranoia being the founding assumption of information asymmetry (whether or not such asymmetry exists); paranoia being the vast anxiety that the partiality of the information available to your tranche is damagingly less than it needs to be, for your specific expertise to receive what’s (as you see it) due. To commit yourself to a given mastery is to rob rival avenues of the time they’d demand: what mortal doesn’t worry that a different selection of time-investment might have delivered different advantages and counter-privileges. Because look at THEM over THERE — how did they know to get to know who they know…

Hence (inevitably) there’s endless fightback; there’s never not been been a fightback against the alleged atomised perfection of the Hayekian model, a fightback primarily from within the mass of its own fiercely uncritical adherents. A market is never merely a chaos: yes, it’s a highly turbulent system, and yes, highly opaque to itself — but its movements (of resources, of wealth, of information) follow patterns that can be explained and determined, even when any given explanation/determination remains controversial, limited and inadequate, with no overall explanation/determination able to date to transcend the background politics. Within this opaque turbulence, and the strong concomitant awareness of the fact of the partial information discussed above, those who depend on any given local knowledge for their livelihood — and those who are committed to the wider values embedded in the knowledge in question — will certainly band together: and will try and form structures to protect and promote the values they value, the skills, techniques, insights, the embedded or tacit knowledge that fashion their professional or their cultural or their informal ethos; to establish and protect and advance the continued presence of same within a market system they suspect (and are encouraged to suspect) may be functionally hostile or destructive to same.

All of us exist in an aggregate of larger and smaller overlapping groups, complete with obligations and contradictory loyalties; and the rational commercial agents in Hayek’s story are no exception, their reasons are as skewed as anyone’s by communal loyalties, the affective tribalisms of habit, the convenience of path dependency, the brittle defensiveness toward pre-invested time and attention; the binding and bonding facts of a region’s or a an institution’s history. Even if we assume away malice and fraud within the market (meaning the deliberate and conscious dissemination of false information for gain), management is driven by performance targets — which is to say, imaginary goals — that combine with an anxiety for their own positions, and a constant need to make decisions that affirm these positions (and to describe them and argue for them in termof the justifications of the market, whatever the actual rationale). And so management is ceaselessly placed in the position of destroying the accreted institutional knowledge that it doesn’t itself have, because its (imaginary) market indicators don’t recognise and can’t measure this knowledge. The much-vaunted rationalism of decision within the model becomes a kind of disconnected psychosis in non-model life, incapable of processing anything right there, but undescribed, by model or theory or ideological habit.

Tranches are inevitable, embattled crypto-tribal gatherings and clusterings and opacities within the social. The ‘ideal’ free market — the perfect circulation of goods and information to the benefit of all — has embedded within it a dynamic that cannot but generate the paranoia that fuels entranchement: the fact of the non-resolution of partial knowledge. Right there alongside the relief at not having to educate yourself in the entire science and language and practice of (say) fruit-farming in North Africa — the relative price of the apricot tells you the relative value, and you make your judgment — is the fear that, given someone somewhere knows something you certainly don’t, this someone or another is able to cheat you or fool you (only HIPSTERS pretend to like apricots). Just as the free market unavoidably coalesces into special-interest tranches, the clotting cannot but breed paranoia. Conspiracy theory is the nervous system of capitalism in a liberal polity: wherever you’ve found yourself there’s always a “they” over there, well versed in the exact secret knowledge that’s beggaring you. You know what we all know — that it’s impossible to know everything. So how come, if this is a democracy, is it that the asymmetries of insight always seem to favour this “other”? How did they know to know the things they chose to know?

And over and above this, modern democracy is in its ideal by definition in tension with the perspectives (and thus the interests) of the specialist; of all the many projects of the multi-form tranche. As knowledge structures itself into interest groups (corporate or professional) — and what else can it do? — politics right left and centre will be (is being; has been) shaped by conflicts between types and schools of expertise. Of course some take it as read that such intra-class squabbling is only ever a mask for deeper, more fundamental conflicts. But is it? Or better ask, can the fundamental conflict be “unmasked”, absent recourse to intellectual competition between all the relevant schools of political explanation and transformation (and their attendant systems of interested expertise)? Ask: when finally stripped of the distortions of economic or landed (or “cultural”?) status and hierarchy, will democracy also escape all the various rival lateral claims of established expertise? What will resolve or soothe this over-informed, over-invested, over-educated form of the war of all against all?

Certainly the structures of authority within the various professions have appeared in the past to survive conquests and revolution, even as details of practice and doctrine get shuffled. In any case, to return to the present, the politics of expertise is hard. Not only do you have to know what you’re doing and be able convince others who know what they’re doing; you must also at some point persuade everyone else. And humans — especially those with the vanity and drive to battle their way to the top of their field — are stubborn, egoistic, self-interested items. Threatened old-guarders will defend their turf; mere wily opportunists will always be circling. Change can be exciting, provided you feel you’re in the loop and in the know, not having something foisted on you; losing control of your already precarious lives can be terrifying. We mostly don’t think or act well when we feel threatened; on the contrary, we often react furiously badly.

Anyway, I hope I’ve given a sense of the extent to which lateral tranche warfare exists all across this story, a hundred years ago and today too, perhaps obscured and often recruited into all the (better recognised) “up-down” class conflicts. In one sense, the Polar race could hardly have been more cut-and-dried. Pioneering a new-and-untried route, Amundsen got there first; got back safe; his men were plumper and fitter when they arrived back at base than when thy’d left. The Norwegians treated it as a ski-race, a sporting event they’d invented; a sport they still in 1911-12 easily dominated. Their triumph was cheeky and deft: they won.

And then everything else kicked in. The RH view: Scott’s followers and supporters, united in grief, guilt and humiliated embarrassment, began gaming the refs: to fashion a win for their man by redefining the meaning of victory. A “moral” victory over the Antarctic; a victory — as the more religious were able to claim — over death itself. [39e]

Huntford, you could reductively argue, is simply angry on on behalf of the slighted art, craft and science of skiing: this is his tranche and he’s sticking with it. Every revenant claim excusing the British explorer’s bungling is for RH a renewed contemptuous assault on Lapp, Inuit and Norwegian craft mastery. These distant simple peoples with their funny unmetropolitan customs — how could they possibly anything unadjusted for in the hallowed halls of grand metropolitan assumption? Nothing will flame us more explosively than the airily ignorant dismissal of something we know in our bones to be true.

But there’s unbridled fury here too behalf of the slighted art of history. To fashion a history of his chosen tranche — to view one discipline through the lens of another, from prehistoric roots to modern sport and leisure activity, 2P&P must weave a tale out of every contradictory pressure and tendency shaping the evolution of a multi-purpose technology — must reintroduce all empirical details at any given stage, including the forces brought to bear by rival nationalisms, military requirement, the egos of sportsfolk, the entracements and curiosities of science, the contradictory advances and fashions of craft and industrial manufacture, the many divergent landscapes, snowscapes, climates and practical traditions of different skiing peoples at different times, the stubbornness, snobbishness, pretensions, vigour, greed, health and waywardness of an insanely large cast of characters in no sense mutually aware, less still in social and political sync. In other words, RH must reintroduce to his story vast background amounts of the various partial systems of information and value that the market economy would have had to shear off to function at the level of undistorted price-assignment. Commodification, I find myself arguing, absolutely specifically counters and disables the ethos of the historian in particular, and all rival disciplines committed to the re-examination of resolved and unresolved alternative complexities. (And once again, I hear my own obscure interests catcalling softly through this story…)

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my comanions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman”
Robert Falcon Scott, Message to the Public, 21-29 March 1912

“Adventures are a mark of incompetence”
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Arctic explorer and ethnologist

AGENCY, LUCK AND STRUCTURE: BUT THE GREATEST OF THESE IS STRUCTURE. The longstanding Norwegian culture of snow-science aside, Amundsen — a driven, somewhat secretive loner — created much of his support network from scratch: he kept even his idol Nansen in the dark. And he threw his mind into reducing the play of luck wherever he could imagine it intervening. Scott was a spendthrift with luck. The entire voyage is a litany of narrow scrapes: the overladen Terra Nova nearly foundered a few days out of New Zealand; the near-criminal lunacy of the escapades with the ponies in the sound when the ice went out, and the entire Winter Journey project; the SPP’s impossibly squeaky escape and Tom Crean’s lone 18-hour march. An affair dogged by misfortune this really wasn’t, by any serious accounting: any luck banked was casually thrown away long before it was needed. Unlike his rival, Scott seems both uncomprehending and toothless before the structures shaping his destiny, until after death — through death — a way was found to refashion the way the world understood the issue.

Which returns us to the death of Seaman Evans, long weeks before bad weather or low rations and fuel were fully a factor. The five Norwegians were a team of equals, each a high-end niche technician under a leader they’d (more or less) democratically agreed to follow; a leader with a deep grasp of the respective technical ability at his command; the collective cemented by mutual recognition and trust. In an otherwise upper-middle-class and officer-class tent, Evans was there as handyman and porter. Large as it was, Scott’s expedition inevitably reflected Edwardian class structure, and within this the rigid hierarchies of the Edwardian Royal Navy, as well the intellectual rankings of the sanctioned official science of the day. To be free to apply themselves to science, scientists would not be asked to mend sleeping bags or design snowshoes or pack and unpack sledges. In fact, science was one of the few realms Scott himself seemed comfortable in: he enjoyed the company of professional scientists, and they returned the compliment, enjoying the pertinent questions this intelligent amateur would ask.

Interested amateurism was perhaps one escape-route from the collision of incompatible rigidities Scott face as leader of this expedition. Another was — paradoxically? — to throw himself into matter of the march itself. The party at the pole was a gesture towards Edwardian identity politics — naval officer Scott and his faithful sidekick Bowers, Wilson the doctor and published amateur zoologist, Oates representing the army, Evans representing the men. Isn’t there a sense in which Scott — who had immense physical stamina — really was escaping from the cares of leadership into the back-breaking labour of unskilled manhauling, for thousands of miles, as if to say, we’re in this together, simple packponies now one and all?

But Evans, also caught in this unforgiving, unbending cross-ply of obligations and inherited class and professional structures, has no such escape-route into play-acting, as he discovers that the quite specific qualities he’d been selected for are all now failing him, horribly: his physical strength, his deft craftsmanly handiwork, his role as a symbol (the right man from below decks). His hands were useless, his strength was failing, his steadiness was evaporating into querulous panic…

One recent biographer, David Crane, belatedly attempts in Scott of the Antarctic to shield poor Evans from the worst of this: “Weight loss, dehydration, possible head injury, vitamin deficiency, hypothermia, mental collapse, the effects of scurvy in its early, undetectable stages — whatever the reason or the combination of reasons that lie behind Evans’s death, the two myths that can be thrown out are the notion of the ‘isolation’ of a lower-deck man in a tent full of officers, and the egregious error of Scott in taking Evans in the first place.” [40]

Crane never quite says outright that he’s arguing with RH here, but assuming he is (and he is), Crane entirely misses the import of Huntford’s argument. It’s true that RH has little sympathy for Evans, portraying him as out of condition, a rollicking drinker and blowhard unfit to task, mentally or physically. Yet what Crane calls “myths” are not RH’s inventions, after all: Gran it was that judged Evans mentally unfit [41]; as for the suggestion that being trapped in a tiny tent with four men not of his own kind would have been a lonely and emotionally daunting burden, this came from Evans’s fellow seaman and acquaintance of many year Seaman Lashly, giving evidence in the mid-teens before the unofficial court of Oates’s furiously angry and grieving mother [41a]. Gran and Lashly may both be quite wrong, but they were highly intelligent fellow expeditioners and their judgments can’t simply be handwaved away.

So no one to vent to; no one in that final crowded tent that Evans could ever drop his class mask with. The strongman too weak to play his part. The worker whose manual dexterity was his livelihood, his future and (no doubt) his pride: and whose hands were in fact now ruined (from frostbite and a bad gash sustain when rebuilding the sledge high on the ice plateau, which refused to heal). Huntford doesn’t empathise with Evans, but his antenna for the crosscurrents of tension are witchily sensitive: five men huddled together night on night, in a tent made for four, in a situation without respite or hope of pause. Even granting Scott’s insistence that he never saw the journey to the Pole as a race, the journey back was nothing but, and undertaken by tired and defeated men without alternative was now a race against death itself.

“[H]e shows signs of losing heart over it,” wrote Scott on 30 January, of Evans’s physical state, “which makes me much disappointed in him”: the final clause suppressed, in the official published version of the journal. And yes, of course such unsympathetic exasperation is driven by Scott’s own gathering exhaustion and anxieties. And yes, Scott’s journal was now both public record and the one place he could go to vent. And no, we simply can’t know the true dynamics in the tent, what kindness (or roughness) Evans’s tentmates showed him at the last, as they attempted frantically to halt his psychological decline. But Scott’s state of mind was a consequence of his own command and his own decisions — and when Crane claims that Scott had taken Evans for old friendship’s sake, his argument must accommodate Scott’s actual private words, when we know them. Seemingly judicious in tone, a likeable relief from Huntford’s relentless contempt, Crane’s book nevertheless quietly and routinely dodges the issue of the passages edited out of Scott’s journals. [42]

As so often, Crane’s is a bioography of Scott that keeps discussion of Amundsen — and the dissenting Norwegian perspective — to a minimum. Absent this primary conflict, the many overlooked sources Huntford has brought into the public domain — often by translation from the Norwegian — are all too easily folded back into a less demanding form. Perhaps Huntford does select and interpret to Scott’s disbenefit: but challengers must confront the whole, or explain why they needn’t. [43]

And what we don’t have, and will never have, is Evans’s own evidence. Perhaps the most tragic figure in an awful story, we only ever glimpse him, blurred and obscured, through the eyes of others. Scott found a way to tell his own tale his own way, and to recruit almost everyone into a co-dependency with it. Evans is shuffled away into an awkward bit-part role: evidence unseen, unheard, unrediscovered, unrecoverable. “What killed Evans?” asks ACG softly and bluntly angry on p.573 of WJiW; but on p.524 he’d already hinted what: “Things began to go not quite right: they felt the cold, especially Oates and Evans: Evans’s hands were also wrong — ever since the seamen made that new sledge. The making of that sledge must have been fiercely cold work: one of the hardest jobs they did. I am not sure that enough notice has been taken of that.” [44]

Another digression: notes excavated from a counter-tranche to the Hayekian view of value. In the mid-19th century, when economists were attempting to define and explain value, they rooted it in labour-time: David Ricardo argued that the value of an item derived from the amount of labour expended to produce it, the Labour Theory of Value (LTV), and Karl Marx — seeking to undermine orthodox political economy by turning its own grounding against it — wrote a very long book exploring the consequences, distortions and social injustices to be discovered if you take this orthodox definition as a premise. Not long after, mainstream economics found a way to diminish the role of LTV in its theories of value. Which perhaps sidesteps Marx’s claim that a contradiction wells up from within the market-as-system, but nevertheless in the process casually reduces all our own personal valuations of our own personal lived time working to an externality; to uncostable irrelevance and merely subjective ghosts. [44a2]

Money mattered to both expeditions, of course — or rather, the lack of it mattered; funding was always scarce, and needed scaring up, with all the distorting promises this can entail. But wealth had never been Amundsen’s driving passion: all he’d ever wanted was to bag the pole (actually the North Pole) [44a]. Scott’s ultimate goal is less clear, obscured in the competing tangle of professional commitments his diffuse project entailed. If, per Huntford, we can also discern self-immolation as the purpose, at least after Amundsen’s arrival, then the shift of faith back to exploration as pitiless pack-animal slog makes a certain strange sense. Man-hauling was as self-destructively primitive as slaves forced to build pyramids till they dropped. With demands and obligations so intractably conflicting, why not just drop out of the entire ghastly mess of tranche-warfare into the dignity, so-called, of undiluted sledge-hauling labour. [44a3]

I’m often baffled by the politics people declare — when I was on ilx there were probably half a dozen aggressively regular posters who considered themselves lefties who really really weren’t of the left, and it seems to me there’s a distinct fissure here too, running through the allegiances RH declares, a man ostensibly of the right battling only half-aware against his own declared choices — perhaps through the fog of the myth of radical individualism — not just to honour the non-professional fallen as fully as their credentialed companions; but to restore unofficial or unapproved routes to best knowledge to their rightful and earned level of respect.

Summarising in RSP in 2010 how background fashions in politics mirror reactions to his various polar biographies, RH perhaps sweepingly associates Thatcher with Scott’s rival Shackleton [44e], that self-taught amateur and social outsider who was adored by his men and explored by the skin of his teeth, that roguish and charming entrepreneur who got himself into scrapes but always out of them too. Shackleton is a hard figure not to have a soft spot for, but few of Huntford’s readers today will see much evidence of Shackleton’s amiable ilk anywhere round us. Let management manage was the Thatcherite mantra. Actually existing society post-Thatcher could hardly be less Shackletonian in the lee of this precept: cadres and combines of the powerful refusing ever to be held accountable, management whingeing bitterly when accountability is even mooted. Wielding ghastly instruments of asymmetric knowledge and jargonised obscurantism, predatory corporate raiders like Lord Hansen — hostile stakeovers and asset-stripping are nothing if not the destruction of patiently accrued local specialist knowledge — have laid waste to swathes of experience and expertise for ruthlessly market-justified reasons. And of course press-barons like Rupert Murdoch have shown not the slightest tenderness toward the subtleties of the complexity of scholarly understanding, or the tacit artisanal wisdom of the skilled worker in any given industry-under-threat. It is really very hard indeed to look around the world that Hayek remade, and argue that knowledge is better nurtured and nowhere threatened; that truth and value are somehow today better able to counter the machineries of moneyspinning fiction and power-gathering.

The hierarchy of the British Edwardian gentleman was deeply ambivalent about professionalism — doctors and lawyers could be accepted into it, as could scientists, but RH is basically correct: to best access this degree of technical ability a gentleman hired someone he trusted. To be the best at what you did because you hard to make a living was faintly absurd to the denizens of this upper-class layer: only its eccentrics and dissidents ever seriously embarked on a vocation or a skilled trade themselves. This is an attitude easy to dislike; Huntford detests it. He see, too, how patronising was the affection sometimes paid by the upper classes to the artisanal layers below the officially professional, and to those “honest working men” who embraced their symbolic as well as their economic role. But — however deludedly — there’s a kind of topsyturvy envy here also: a vaguely grasped sense that to escape from the purblind labyrinth of privileged perspective and partial understanding, you had to see everything from below, from the perspective of an absence of any inherited or learned advantage. [44a4]

Hayek’s model of the market, his defence of commodification as a effective machinery of exchange which usefully and accurately simplifies an impossible mass of information, is a model that entirely rejects the relevance of LTV to any grown-up discussion of value. In this world Evans’s sense of himself is simplified and exiled, overwritten into invisibility. As is any labourer’s valuation of his own time, his own skills and purpose, his own plans for his own future. Commentators since have sometimes projected dreams into him — he would quit the navy, set up a little pub in Wales, doubtless called “The South Pole” and live out his days telling tall and amusing tales as its landlord — but how he actually felt is forever elided from the conversation. He had no one — except perhaps Lashly in one instance — to battle on his behalf. [44b]

As the expedition’s second-in-command Lt Evans could presumably have asked pertinent questions early, about risks and flaws and corners cut. Instead he exhausted himself, out of misplaced ambition, in the scramble for polar priority — and his life was only saved by Lashly’s and Crean’s generous and courageous solicitude. Possibly somewhat scurvied themselves, the two seamen stuck with their senior officer and saved his life. This too is worth dwelling on, when so much in the story — not just the Scott/Amundsen race, but within the Scott camp and even within the much smaller Amundsen camp — is a tale of intensely divided loyalties and obligations: of professionals caught between their commitment to the ethics of their professional, and their commitment to the reputation of the expedition; of friends with a duty of honorable care to fallen companions; of the various contrasting acts of sacrifice which established this nexus of duty. While Scott was still imagined alive and defeated, the expedition remained a grab-bag of resentments, disappointments and buck-passing: his death — his self-sacrifice — allowed expedition and immediate family to fashion a “cultural movement” that conjured ethos-trumping loyalty to the expedition which was enormously politically potent (especially in the context of the Great War); and also — once it emerged into the wider media world — quite information-destructive. The three doctors, the entire contingent of scientists, working to obscure the issue of scurvy: science as an ethos subtly betrayed in the name of a distorted image of itself. [44c] Figures like Ponting or Cherry-Garrard gritting their teeth to help sacralise and purify an affair they had deeply ambiguous feelings towards. The uncolonised or refusenik layers or margins – from the Inuit, via the voiceless working men like Evans and his bereaved family, to obsessive focused micro-expert loners like Amundsen — without well-established platforms within the validated structures of the imperium on which to combine their perspectives, against the establishment of even quite bad science. Highest of high likelihoods is that they’ll fall out before they even begin to find common ground. Against all this, or with it but somewhat lost in it — they won decorations for valour and Lt Evans’s undying gratitude — the patient unselfish cross-class care of Lashly and Crean…

The Hayekian model of the market is where all professional confrontations must be mediated — confrontations between clubs and corporations, associations, institutes and movements, parties and nations and every other aggressive-defensive electively affine gathering. Here genuine potential conflict can indeed sometimes be diverted into the “marketplace of ideas” (or the lawcourts). This adjudicates between embattled modes of expertise and rival structures of passion — but it’s also the medium that cultures and generates this rivalry, this passion, off out from under the rational into the world of endless maddened petty bourgeois flamewar. [44d]

The social battles of specific expertise — the inevitable resentments and fury of an equally inevitable partial knowledge — point in all directions at once, of course. Laterally it points most of all, at rival tranches and temples of understanding. Downward it points, at the uninitiated masses as viewed from in-tranche perspective — sometimes as scurrying apprentice wannabes, not yet in on the marvels of understanding to be had; sometimes as unbudgeably torpid and unconvinceable know-nothings; sometimes as the seething unsalveageably threatening counter-mass. But also — in the end — it always also points up, at management with its generalisations and its targets and its theories and its fashions, all the many uniforms (as everyone in the middle agrees) of overpaid incompetence. (Management types are even more prone than academics to the self-interested adoption of those trends and systems they can best wield for professional advantage in intra-departmental warfare…)

There’s a politics here, but it’s intricate and tricky. In my own work, the critics I mainly lose patience with are those who skate past detail they can’t see or hear — or (worse) treat the techniques needed to analyse the detail as mere absurd scams. (Problematic, yes, often enough, no doubt; scams they almost never are). Push such critics a little — draw attention to the blanks that exist, that require explanation or exploration, and suddenly the anger and the defensive contempt are there. It’s unsettling to discover we require knowledge we didn’t expect to need to do our job properly — and some turn this about to declare the lack a value, and haughtily polish the turds of their ignorance, as badge of achievement. And so it goes round, and so it goes round: it’s almost always a two-way inflagration: because partial knowledge is everywhere a feature.

History as a discipline is ill-served by the market; by what I’ve sketched as the process of Hayekian commodification corrodes the deep ethos of the scholar. The pop breakthrough of Huntford’s first book, LPoE — it sold well; it made highly entertaining useful noise — derived, I suspect, from its brute slayage of sacred (if dated) cultural cows; RH found minor celebrity as a sourpuss maverick and troll… and most of those who’ve engaged him since respond to this and skip much too quickly past all the much more subtle, interesting and extensive lacunae and conundra within this ineluctably tangled field of tranche-warfare. Which is not to say that an aggressive defensiveness towards your own specialism — inevitable as it is in any context of contested values — isn’t largely also a good thing. You really probably do see or hear or know things other people. A hermeneutics of pure suspicion is a lazy thing as much as a brave thing; certainly a widespread and an established thing, all too quickly a boring and a, well, square thing. What drives an implacability as stubborn Huntford’s? More than simple dislike; more than ordinary disciplinary tribalism; more than merely bigoted judgmentalism; and more too than mere party-political kneejerkiness (especially within a partisanship as hard-to-parse and contradictory as Huntford’s).

There a commitment to the deep ethos of the social-professional-aesthetic tranche you identify with, which is suddenly all emotional triggers when menaced with disrespect or dismissive indifference. In the end, Huntford’s deep sympathies do lie with the slighted science of skiing and — not quite so easily conjoined — with the hard-won (and easily re-obscured) intricacies of popular history; in the end, it’s in defence of a perceived threat to this species of life-long investment and self-validation — of passion and expertise — that the uncontrolled crackle of quasi-political temper is most often heard. Heard here as Huntford’s own half-understood self-disgusted need to heighten the contradictions and accelerate the conflicts, to get the blanks on his map attended to at all.

GLOSSARY of ACRONYMS
RH = Roland Huntford
LPoE = “The Last Place on Earth” aka “Scott & Amundsen” (Huntford’s first book on this specific topic)
RSP = “Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scottand Amundsen” (Huntford’s most recent book on this specific topic)
2P&P = “Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing” (Huntford delivers what it says on the tin)
ACG = Apsley Cherry Garrard
WJitW = The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry Garrard’s 1922 memoir of the Scott expedition
PP = the Polar Party (Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, PO Evans)
FSP = the First Supporting Party (Lt Evans, Lashly, Crean)
SSP = the Second Supporting Party (Atkinson, Cherry Garrard, Wright, Keohane)
LTV = Labour Theory of Value

From Brian Joseph Davis’s The Composites: “Images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters”

(<– He’s not on this one, I don’t think: but I spent long hours as a kid poring over the cover as I listened to my parents’ copy, so I can’t help the association.)

ET is crowd-sourcing responses to questions that relate to his thesis, which is about music-writing and the internet. Question #2 was “what is the role of the music critic?” — and he’s kicked off the debate with an answer I sent him some time last year. Which in turn links back to my review of Marcello’s book, which drew a distinction between the critic’s role and the reviewer’s. (Yesterday’s was on trolling…)

A scientist and teacher by profession, my father had been an excellent amateur calligrapher in his youth, and an artist in ink, as well as an occasional poet. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967, but a badly shaky writing hand was the earliest symptom, some time before that, and he had to switch to his other hand to teach himself how to write from scratch, giving up drawing for ever. The condition takes you through cycles of capability — from flail to freeze and back — that mean that you are all too often not to be able to get your limbs to do the most ordinary things, such as picking up the pills which will cycle you through blessed mid-way periods of balance for a while, but then out again into the opposite unbalanced state. The effect on anything more deftly ambitious will eventually be devastating, but for some the slow on-set of the disease will mean — as my father’s poem below suggests — that the passions and possibilities of your art have become intimately tangled with Parkinson’s itself, how you feel about it, how you work with it; what you want to do, what you can no longer do. And in fact he lived with it — as did we, his family — for 43 years, an unusually long time.

Barbara Thompson, the virtuoso jazz saxophonist and composer, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1997, and for five years Mike Dibb’s camera has recorded her, on-stage and off, as the moment approaches when she will have to retire from the public performance that she loves. To anyone with the condition, or in their close family, there will be many piercingly familiar elements in this documentary. Some of them are really quite small — a close-up on her fingers as she stiffly walks them among pills on a table’s edge, and the elegant little pillbox close by (living with dad, nothing was more necessary to remember than the baroque complexity, from the very start, of his regime of medication). Some things are deeper, and more subtle. Dibb’s film follows Thompson and her husband Jon Hiseman, the jazz-rock drummer, far into their domestic life together, at home, visiting doctors and on tour — and while Hiseman is not especially like my mother temperamentally, there’s something about the stubborn, almost dogged thoughtfulness that support for his life-partner has called from him, that I certainly recognise. Mum was dad’s primary carer for almost four decades, and solving practical obstacles together, large and small, requires great mutual trust and patient teamwork. If this occasionally came at a cost — being a carer will sometimes generate enormous exasperation, frustration, even angry resentment– it nevertheless created a deep bond between them that all the family drew on and worked with: something similar suffuses this film.

But there are differences too. My father was no musician, and Thompson is one of the leading players of her generation in her field. If you don’t know her name you will know some of her music: for example, she played the flute line in the famous themetune to the South Bank Show (Hiseman’s Colosseum II are the backing band), and the music — including the incidental wisps of heavily echoed saxophone — to the detective series A Touch of Frost are composed and played by her. But there’s as much mystery as recognition for me, when I watch recent footage of her on-stage, the fluid mastery of her instrument she still (astonishingly) retains as it combines with the characteristic Parkinsonian near-toppling jerkiness of gait. Is there something about the nature of music’s physical movements — technical virtuosities internalised over years of repetitive practice — that leaves them perhaps not untouched by the condition, but somehow sometimes given a kind of brief grace and remission… Or is it something about the abstracted state of mind when playing?

I’ve written about music long enough, and worked with enough artists and makers, to know that both are physical disciplines which flourish in the curious shadowland between willed movement and learned automatism — and this, of course, is the shadowland that Parkinson’s patrols and bedevils. It’s an affect that lurks between the imagined and willed consciousness. Think of yourself running downstairs — nimble and safe as long as you don’t think about where to put your feet. Now imagine this for every single movement you make, no matter how simple: every simple step you take; every time you pick something up; even smiling can be an effort. And for many sufferers, the medication brings hallucinations with it, distracting even when they’re benign — much of the time bedridden in his later years, my father now and then entirely failed to mark the difference between yesterday’s facts and events he’d that night dreamed.

Musicianship winds mind into exactly these learned traceries of agility and fantasia — all the patterns internalised, the scales, the arpeggios, the conventional turns and trills, figures and cadences, which an improvisor plays with, shifts and games and transformations passing across the face of familiarity faster (so it seems to outsiders) than thought can possibly consciously modify action. Somewhere in the pathways from brain to nerve and muscle, from imaginative concentration to the physical habits of its realisation, the signals the Parkinsonian is sending him or herself can curl back on themselves, and the body clogs or blocks or freezes, or else writhes into uncontrollable spasms. Which means — though he took early retirement and against all expectation lived for another three decades — my father wasn’t able to spend that time writing anything like as much as I believed he would have wanted, even while electric typing was still possible (with painstaking hunt-and-peck and clever ribbons that lifted any errors back off the page). The disease didn’t stop him composing poems in his head — but even the bouts of intense involvement sometimes overflowed into an over-stimulated jerkiness that made it impossible to keep the paper he was reading in his hands, or on his knees or the table. I don’t know if he’d have ended up a published poet if Parkinson’s hadn’t come for him when it did — or in fact if he even wanted this. His preferred style wasn’t exactly fashionable, certainly in avant-garde or middlebrow terms — though Thompson’s music isn’t, either, at least in the UK (some of her music you almost certainly know, but the musicians she tours very largely play only to audiences overseas, though quite large audiences). It wasn’t entirely a private pleasure for him — he liked when people read it and were interested or entertained — but it was perhaps never a driving, mono-focus passion either.

Not everyone will enjoy this poem about (and to) the condition, I imagine. “A Sonnet to PD” casts Parkinson’s Disease as something — or rather someone — external to him, a complex, witchy paramour, detailing the sinister, sensual physicality of this, its horrors and its allures. Which is a very particular way, and quite an unsettling way to see his situation, and the specifics of his relationship with this disease (he was intensely phobic about spiders), but this, I think, is what he’s exploring: the degree to which PD is a condition that can adapt itself to its target, as intimately and inimitably and wilfully as a problematic, unavoidable, unrefusable acquaintance. An acquaintance –– an entanglement, even a muse — who impacts on one’s ideas and sense of artistic self, and on the shape and direction of one’s creative ambitions.

There’s a fascinating moment in the documentary when Hiseman asks a specialist if there’s a link between obsessive, meticulous, vision-driven personalities — do they perhaps have an advantage, cope better as patients, he wonders? Well, replies the specialist, perhaps caught a little unawares, research suggests they may actually be more prone to the condition in the first place. Perhaps they do cope better — but the medication may also unmask the obsessive characteristics. The specialist is doing his job, of course, and this ultra-diplomatic mode of generalisation is unavoidable (why else use the word “unmask”?) Careful generalisation is what medical science is, and he’s probably anxious not to light too many fires of hope round essentially magic solutions — it’s a condition that attracts them — but nevertheless there’s an element of wily particularity to this condition. As you develop tactics to overcome problems, it’s learning them and somehow adapting: and this is magic thinking too, but of a rather different kind.

Our forebears certainly weren’t helping themselves when it came finding cures — or even just balms — but nor were they necessarily idiots when they thought about such conditions in terms of “possession”: the belief that sometimes there’s another being present, in the exact same body, knowing and feeling the exact same things, but with its own agenda; the belief in some being the patient is always in negotiation with; a being that you can on occasion negotiate a ceasefire with. Certainly this is not so far away from my own conceptualisation and practical-emotional coping mechanism, as a long-time secondary carer. My sister and I looked after my father — and after my mother too, when she became too stressed or unwell; our role became to untangle the conflicting requirements of their care, especially the emotional ones. And just as depressives personalise their condition as the “black dog” — a creature visiting and vanishing on its own timetable — Parkinsons was more easily lived with (for me) if I imagined it as a creature, sentient and even perversely clever, but not-quite human-sentient, which knew dad inside out, as he knew it. I too came to feel as if the condition had a personality, had agency, had its own individual relationships, with dad, with mum, with all of us, one by one: its own attachments and provisional allegiances and plots and wiles to divide us. Perhaps a little like some of the demons in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — they have their targeted passions and their allocated agendas, some of them are far from stupid, some of them can even be charming, but their comings and goings, their interventions and remissions are unbiddably theirs to confer or withold. Often and often, when my sister and I were strategising this emergency or that impasse, all this was whispering in the back of my mind.

Plainly it would be fanciful — and ridiculous — to argue that BT’s approach to her musicianship conjured the demon into being, that it’s somehow an artefact of her shaping herself into so focused and driven a master of her craft. But is there something about the act of playing that lulls and enchants it, at least for a while? She talks about music — composition as much as performance — as an “escape”; about it being a place where she isn’t constantly reminded of the realities of the condition. A lot of the daily fact of dealing with it is mundane and unglamorous, without even getting into the blandly anonymous not-quite-shabby feel of hospital waiting rooms and corridors. One of the things we came to recognise about dad was his ability to focus his energies for some upcoming non-mundane event he was looking forward to; the yearly village fete was one, family Christmas another. He could be “up” during the event for far longer than we all dared hope, but would crash the next day, totally exhausted. My heart goes out to Thompson, and the demands of sheer logistics, when it comes to bringing your best energy and mobility not just to touring — with all its timetabled rigidity and unplanned minor crises, and endless unglamorous lobbies and corridors — but to the pencilling in the necessary practice and rehearsal, all the concentrated unseen work that keeps your fingers and lips and responses in pitch-perfect trim for full unfettered creative flight. Especially when you also want to keep some of the best of yourself back, for private family time.

Mark Sinker, February 2012

1: the photo at the top was probably taken in 2001, by my mother perhaps 12 years ago, by my sister, Dr Becky Sinker, in North Wales: dad in his favourite jumper in one of his favourite places — and it captures his impishness, which wasn’t always there to see (Parkinsons leaves the face rigid and austerely expressionless a lot of the time).
2: the photo on the right is from June, 1960, the exact month of my birth, and some years before the condition had manifested: and he’s at the far right, a Vogue model teaching at Whixall Moss. (It may well not be Whixall Moss, but he often taught there, and this is how he looked wherever he taught in those days, the Field Studies Dandy.)

Naturalist and pioneering conservationist, Charles Sinker was director of the Field Studies Council from 1973-83, primary author of Ecological Flora of the Shropshire Region (1991), and editor of Hilda Murrell’s Nature Diaries (1987). He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967 and would live with it for 43 years, with curiosity and fortitude, until his death in January 2010.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON

i: These days the Silvery Juggheds are quite dead to me, which is a pity. I think there are three reasons I turned against them. First, they really did scare me when I was a wee meatspace tiny myself on Old Mars/Telos/Mondas/London Underground/I DON’T REMEMBER OK, as they stumbled spongily through dark b/w tunnels killing killing killing: and the residue of terror vanished is often contempt. Third and recent, the Nu-Who protocols of UTTERLOGICWAR are primarily feebly stampy gags across the clichés of easycopy post-digitial computer discourse (“Delete!” and ect and ect and zzzz) which are as soon-to-be-dated as they’re dreary. But second middle and most, there really was often something spookily poetic about the pre-hardbody ‘Bermen. They looked half-formed; they battled their confused mass-larval way out of shrink-wrap cocoons at the end of the first ep; there was something genuinely alien about them, somehow, their humanoid form more an organic pod-production than a factory-line metal macho. Or something (for more on this, see my comments on THE INVASION pt 2 at Helix 8b, at para iii. And of course maybe the middle reason find itself more part of reason three than not: hauntology, as we know, is the soft shift of today’s stupid technology-habit back towards yesterday’s anxious unspoken future-threat dreams blah blah beebaw bleugh. All of which is mainly just to set the scene for my not being v.blown away by this v.famous story…

ii: … Not that 5IVE seems terribly impressed either. In fact he’s distracted from the off: he seems fed up, world-weary and enough not his cheerful easygoing self that viewer unease breeds. The whole section of the first ep where he’s elaborately tormenting Young Adric by telling him nothing about anything — kind of a BadBaker Throwback Obnoxion Tic — is actually quite odd, even as a dramatic-irony set-up for later grief and guilt (if this is indeed what is later depicted). And then when the Juggheds turn up, his exasperated fed-upness doubles. Genuine WhoSchoolers will correct me here, but I believe they’d been absent from DW for quite a while, perhaps because writers had got written them off — absent since old HoboDays possibly, except didn’t BIG HEAD briefly skirmish with a forlorn handful late in the ‘Hed timeline (at which point they are declared scattered and diminished and laughable). None of the companions recognise them whn they first appear in EARTHSHOCK, and 5ive does nothing to clue them in to nature of danger: you’d think Who’s ancient war with the Juggheds (how they see each other; how they joust) is worth a bit more than this backstory insertion than this — if 5ive’s mug is a guide, this is just more boring pest control, just more unending admin, bottling up stupid not-really-robots, protecting stupid self-regardless humanity, shepherding and staving off stupid whiny LOGICBOY…

iii: … who (doctoral unkindness notwithstanding) is a good deal of any stumbling block, is he not? See, once there was Sherlock H, and today there is Sheldon C, and in-between — mightier far than either as a science-fictional archetype — is of course SPOCK: and Matthew Waterhouse was a very young unpracticed semi-non-actor required to realise all kinds of facets of the “reason vs emotion: which will win?” type storyline, NARRATIVE AND THE DIALECTICS OF hem hem PURE LOGIC if you will: facets he was simply not suited to (especially when poorly served by the script). (ps by no means a new topic for me to be picking at, in Helixterms: cf also THE INVASION Part 1 and Part 2 (feat.Cybermen), as well as FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (feat.Adric).) Indeed EARTHSHOCK actually skirts (tho doesn’t really resolving into) a kind of high-level Comi-tragic Logic-Off — Logicboy vs the Top Local Botman in Charge — with inadvertent solo self-sacrifice defeating trollingly psychotic mass exterminationism (hurrah). But (certainly compared with linked eps) not in a way you learn anything much from (unless you’re learning how not to write a moral fable). (Or how to write, period.) Primarily because this may be because JugHead-in-Chief is actually a terrifically pompous — and really NOT very rational — fellow, giving his speeches strangely over-emphatic readings and constantly re-improvising a poorly controlled plan to to destroy a planet to disrupt a conference so that he can humiliate and torment the fleshly (“That’s sadistic!” squeaks Tegan at one point. “No, it’s scientific!” declares the Jugghead serenely… ) (Adding: I’m advised by wikipedia that the actor, David Banks, recapped this performance several times and became cultishly beloved for the way he says “Excellent!”…)

[UPDATE INSERT (guide to cliffhanger-structure):
a: Danger in the cave! It's latex pervobots with a bomb
b: Bomb defused but NOES! It's invading cybermen offplanet, and the Doctor is being framed for one of their murders
c: he's now onside with the (good) crew members but the freighter is itself a massive flying bomb
d: adric will save the day but oh at what cost?
e: DINOGEDDON]

iv: Sadly, 90% of Real Actual Proper Good Drama is how deftly you get yr heroes and villains on and off-stage, and into the binds and conflicts youwant them in. <--- if this isn't a well-worn dramacraft apothegm it bloody ought to be, if only to underscore why eps like this -- with quite simple cliffhanger structures -- are so tiresomely underwhelming. The cast is both numerous and diversely teamed: all teams ceaselessly splitting up, often quite unnecessarily. The Juggheds we encounter are of course part of a vast army united in vast strategic purpose, but an intricate localised part of this army, with much to do, little of it on point (viz why have they been busy murdering crew members if they want the vast plan to remain secret until too late? Why leave scary homicidal android guarding a defusable bomb instead of ACTUALLY HIDING THE BOMB BETTER etc); the cave-exploring team of course split up, to make it easier for the homicidal kinkybots to pick them off; the freighter crew somewhat ditto but this does give a sense of the sheer SCALE of this ship (=15,000 containers-worth); and the Doctor-Companion dynamics entail their (apparently) not even wanting to move around as a gang, in despite of the demands of the circumstances. To the point where the TARDIS-team atmosphere seems downright haunted and peculiar -- especially when you recall this ep comes after BLACK ORCHID aka NYSSA’S DREAM, with its rich oneiric foreshadowing of doom. There’s a very little bit of me tempted to argue that the Doctor is so distracted and distanced with Adric because, in some intuitive pre-cog subconscious fashion, he *knows* that the puir wee prodigy is not long for this world, and already subconsciously blames himself (I don’t believe this really, I think it’s just muddle-headed scriptwriting)…

v: Anyway time for a direct and simple positive yip yip: Beryl Reid! As a bored and cynical but actually totally competent captain of avast merchant vessel of space, well aware of the dickishness of her crew and the general uselessness of regulations. This includes an excellent reveal-surprise at the first appearance (SPOILER: you’re totally not expecting the ship’s captain to be a woman, let alone this woman). Beryl have made a good quasi-companion actually, Lethbridge-Stewart-style (ie a constant character over a longer arc; not necessarily a TARDIS inhabitant).

vi: various unrelated observations. 1: It’s merely anomalous and quaint given that the ep’s set centuries in Earth’s future, but the various computer tracking technologies, in the cave and on the ship. are also all quite poetic in their blinky bleepy simplicity (= more Hauntology 101 of course). 2:
i liked the bogus time-science round the ship’s engine — that it’s anti-matter contained by a flickeringly reconfigured matter shell, rebuilt every micro-second by “computer controlled electronics”. 3: wai oh wai when we encounter a human traitor the Juggheds have suborned do we never see the anomalous charm and guile they must have put into the seduction? How on earth do traitors ever fall for it? (They’re not all dimwits — cf The Invasion — though this one is. 4: I am a bit fascinated by the sociocultural relationship the ‘Heds have to their blackly clad Latex pervodroids . And (related!) 5: why does the droid-killing technique leave such a slimy — and recognisable — mess?

vii: Writing this up has been of a sluggish slog — partly bcz I’m getting back into the rhythm after a too-long lay-off, but also because I find this quite a hard ep to get to grips with. It’s a BIG IMPORTANT STORY (in long arc terms) without being a particuarly good one: certainly not a well told one. Ideas-wise, it’s potentially really rich — actually probably TOO rich for one four-parter — but I *really* feel I’m projecting an awareness of this richness onto the writers (except it seems very unfair to withhold it: none of this is especially subtle stuff, and — see Helix-Eps already linked — it’s all over early Who, much better grasped). Just to bring focus back to DINOGEDDON to make the point: I genuinely can’t decide if I want them to have made more of this underlying idea, or kept it as a (ideally more deft) Amazing Reveal. The latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event; but the fact of all the mass-produced JuggHeds struggling out of their shrink-wraps as they power up — satirical metaphor ahoy! of human extinction by container-freighter carbon-footprint white-goods consumerism! — would have been very hard indeed for a NuDoc overseer to overlook.

Plus also:

(^^^this exciting aspect — Robot vs Dinosaurs! Fite!! — is a kind of buried conceptual easter egg, except to no apparent purpose)

Putting a lot more thought into this issue than I suspect they ever did — no there is nothing at all wrong with this imbalance, plz to bug-off — I think there’s two aspect to the Matthew Waterhouse problem. First is that logic vs emotion — whiskered as it is in DW terms — gains a lot of potential once a major character is a mathematically brilliant child, in terms of big-question SF and in terms of sit-com misunderstanding. (What Jim Parsons brings to Dr Sheldon Cooper is a layered awareness of different modes and speed and qualities of intelligence, types of thinking and awareness and knowledge that aren’t necessarily transferrable, sensibilities associated with distinct age-groups that not everyone is well attuned to. There’s a constant in-body comedy of incongruity, as if the adult has to catch with the small boy in him, or vice versa: types of “getting it” that pass across a face at different speeds, or pull a body all the different different clownish ways.)

Second is sadder, really: MW actually has a very sweet and engaging face. When he’s not speaking or acting, you quite often really really want to like him (sometimes to hug him). Which possibly powers the abreaction (though others are know get very protective… )

NEXT DAY UPDATE: I say above that the “latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event” but realised as I was bit-by-bit tweaking this entry that this over-compressed reference to the climax actually indicates why the story doesn’t work — which is that it has two Amazing Reveal climaxes combined into just one shock ending, except one is pure Daft Robo vs Dino Thrill Power WHHHEEEE!, and the other is an emotionally important milestone in the long-game unfolding of DW’s understanding of himself, his behaviour, his responsibilities, his failings, his contradictions… The two trample all over one another, in tone and resonance and usefulness.

SECOND UPDATE: I’ve been tweaking piecemeal for two days to clarify and amplify — apologies to anyone reading while this was happening, it’s very unprofessional! The untweaked version is hereat LJ if you want to check what I first wrote. Though it has a slightly different nose there. I feel like there’s more to say, but I’ve leave it for comments.

The disgraced children’s author William Mayne died in 2010, some 57 years after the publication of Follow the Footprints, the first of his more than a hundred books, none of them for adults. A final book came out the year of his death, Every Dog (puissant title in the circumstances), and I haven’t read it yet, though I will. I’ll talk a little about his downfall at the close of this post, and doubtless more later, but what I actually propose to undertake is a gradual reading of these books, such as I can track down, starting with a rereading of the 20-odd that I own and know.

A Swarm in May (1955)

“Five shillings,” said Owen. “Well done, ye!” That was a choir-school phrase: no one knew who had invented it. It was a sign of joy and approval.

Swarm is Mayne’s third book: the first of an admired set of four set in a cathedral school (he went to Canterbury C.S. as a boy): since the cathedral holds services all year round, choristers have to stay in school for at least some of the holidays, or return early. So the setting is emptied: half-staffed, all-male, with Owen, the youngest choirboy — perhaps nine, helped some of the time by an older boy — uncovering curious and unsettling items very material to a bee-keeping ritual rendered vestigial back when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries.
So, buildings with hidden reaches you can creep down into, in which unexpected things are secreted, forgotten or never known by all the grown-ups round you: flashes here of Kipling’s Stalky: which continue in the depiction of teachers (as slightly absurd and eccentric adult cartoons, half-deliberate self-conscious parodies of themselves); in the well observed and witty delineation of trends and memes and traditions and catchphrases in the language the boys speak to one another; and of course Mayne shares Kipling’s fascination with the detailed arcana of specialist knowledge and technique (the jargoned world of choirs and organplayers; the physical feel of the practice of bee-keeping). But really this is a FAR far gentler world than Kipling’s; one in which loneliness very lightly touched on in an ebb and flow of communal affection, and agon (such as it is) uncomplicatedly (and sensibly) worked through.

The Twelve Dancers (1962)

It was no good taking Porky by the hand. The way to lead him was to walk in front. Porky would seem to look at everything else, but he would follow. He would follow anything in a wandering way. Once he had followed a kindly big dog down into the village, all the way from the house. The dog had taken him to its home and then gone to sleep. Ma had rescued Porky, and he had had to walk all the way home as well.

Dancers is set in a semi-isolated Welsh valley, somewhere at the head of the Severn, some not very specified time in the 50s — apparently no cars or radios, let alone TVs, but there is a Queen’s head on the coins: Marlene is new to the village, her mother a cleaner in various local households and a single parent (no backstory on this, or the reasons for their arrival). It’s Marlene’s first encounter with the yearly Traditional Dance, and she’s initiated into this intricate village affair involving girls at the school, curious ‘doors’ of various heights built into the church wall, and a semi-buried old dancefloor atop a nearby hill. The dance-steps (direction and number) decode into a sort of treasure map that will perhaps rediscover a lost or misplaced or deliberately concealed item — a cup — and resolve an ancient dispute over ownership of a tranche of land, known as Commons Wood. If the young-ish local landowner finds and claims it, he believes the land will revert to him: said land is probably not worth much, and he’s really more interested in the archeological riddle, but unsurprisingly there’s a certain crackle of class conflict as various schoolchildren side with or against him in this project (as — in the background — do their parents). Dance as enactment of tension, and as resolution: in the event, everything comes out nice (in fact the ritual indirectly enables a cross-class wedding), but it’s not hard to see this book as a forerunner of Alan Garner’s far more fraught The Owl Service (1967), where the children are rather older, and sexual tension and jealousy power the (explicit) magic that will be uncovered.

A Parcel of Trees (1963)

“I don’t how you’re going to make out at all,” said Mum. “Or I wouldn’t if we didn’t all feel the same. It’s the weather.”
“It’s the dreadful life we lead,” said Susan.
“What do you mean?” said Mum. “You’re the dreadful life, lying about like an old stump.”

Again rooted in a potential conflict about property: the “parcel of trees” of the title is a slice of disputed property cut off from the family garden by the intrusion of a railway line many decades before, and now only accessible through a culvert. Susan (14) discovers this secret near-garden and — when amiably challenged as a trespasser by railway officials — decides to prove that legal ownership has in fact reverted away from the railway company. With the help of a solicitor neighbour (working for free because it’s an unusual and interesting case) she uncovers a pertinent slice of recent very unofficial local history; villagers of very various ages semi-illicitly using the land for several quite unorthodox purposes. Woven into this is the portrait of Susan, her little sister, mum and dad, an odd-because-ordinary family who no more perfectly jigsaw than any non-fictional family (they live over dad’s bakery and must all do shopstuff when it’s busy). What Mayne catches so well is the affectionate combativeness and allusive abruptness of the speech within a loving close group like this, complete with subtle undercurrents of rivalry and rebellion routinised into play squabbles; and underpinning Susan’s need for the intimacy of solitude, probably Mayne’s deepest subject. (The illustrations, which contribute at least equally to the soft-spoken modern sensibility, are by Margery Gill.)

Sand (1964)

The kettle was boiling on a gasring behind the counter, where it had boiled for a century. It had boiled away every layer of paint on the wood nearby, and the steam had removed a deep hollow in the wood as well.

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books, at least those with Jill MacDonald’s cheery pop art Puffin on its cover. Of course, Mayne has a greater interest and thus a superior ear for family-based or school-directed banter than any of these better celebrated ‘grown-up’ modernist counterparts: whose flaw this is you can decide yourself, I guess. The town is situated huddled beside some great sand spar: it is being eaten, month by month, hour by hour, by its own dunes, and — behind the mildly prankish goings-on — it’s very much about the wearisome allure of entropy and erosion, the implacability of non-human forces. While it’s the fourth of four books reviewed here in which some aspect of the past is dug unexpectedly up, it’s the first so far in which the omipresent modern media eye on same plays a role.

****

So can we extract anything yet, from this small and faintly random selection? Actually perhaps not so random: Swarm did much to establish his early reputation: there were four choir school books, and they tidy pretty safely into an already popular a form of middle-class children’s literature: the school story in which “school” very much DOESN’T mean the kind of school most British kids were going to (he would increasingly break from this pattern). The comfortable presence of C. Walter Hodges as illustrator surely helped his recognition. Meanwhile Dancers, Parcel and Sand appear to be be the first three he published with Puffin books, whose role in developing the kidlit canon in the 60s was enormous. This was when Mayne soared into his ‘imperial’ phase; this was when my mum, a passionate amateur expert in children’s book who bought me all three, was paying close and interested attention.

It’s easy — and not especially surprising — to begin to discern themes over a decade’s writing: local ritual and the everyday linked via amateur archeology, generally by children, for example, as well as the persistent idea that digging up and understanding the past can transform a deliberately unmelodramatic but never mundane present. A delicately and often wittily sensual sense of place, and of willed solitude in that place; well sketched location as a kind of flight from company (and vice versa).

And then there’s the fact of his disgrace, and how it fits into all this. In 2004, in his mid-70s, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and placed on the sex offenders’ register for life. The obituary in the Independent contained further detail: “Accusations of indecent assault made in 1973 and 1999 finally came to a head in 2004, when he was taken to court by a farmer’s wife in her fifties whom he had befriended when she was eight. She described being entranced by Mayne, but there were times when her erstwhile friend, normally so kind, witty and affectionate, would force himself on her. This abuse lasted for six years; five other witnesses came forward with similar accounts. Evidence of his criminal behaviour for 15 years from 1960 onwards was overwhelming, leading to a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.”

So there’s the question Tom Ewing discussed several years ago on FT (in a Popular piece on Gary Glitter): “Take William Mayne, for instance, a children’s book writer of immense imaginative and empathic skill, and also convicted of serially abusing fans of his books. Is the thing that makes Mayne an excellent writer for children – his ear and head for how they talk and think – also what made him an effective paedophile, able to win and exploit their trust?” Comments threads on reports of the conviction divide, understandably angrily: anonymous posters arrive to say that they knew Mayne personally (the real Mayne), and the trial was a travesty, in fact and as reported: because he was much worse even than the verdict revealed him, or exactly the opposite, that he was innocent, and maligned. I’m in no position to adjudicate, and don’t plan to: I won’t pretend I’m bringing much new as regards sexual psychology or criminology to this story, and I’m sure I won’t be unearthing relevant new facts in the case.

But I do know a little about books and writing, and indeed about books and reading. All fiction — all writing — is a matter, at some level, of control and manipulation: marks made on a page to nudge a reader from sentence to sentence and page to page, effects conjured in head and heart, to fuse or collide in patterns, some open and undecided, some tried and tested, many much harder to categorise so glibly. It’s not forcing a pun to link the word “author” with the word “authority”: with such easy-to-miss power comes the risk of easy-to-miss irresponsibility, and anecdotes are legion, as we all know, of the ugly behaviour of authors. Nor can it entirely be a shock to recognise that someone who diverts the greater part of their energies to the acts and inner lives of folk that are made up is not always paying intelligent mind to the lives and wounds of those that aren’t.

Mutual misunderstanding was not a new topic in fiction — or even in children’s fiction — but surely few explored it with Mayne’s insight, humour, gentle delicacy or subtlety: how children are not party to adult agendas, compromises, habits and assumptions; and of course vice versa, that in growing up adults have very often lost or set aside a valuable way of seeing the world. That there’s a thread of trust that marks the path everyone is treading, and that this thread is sometimes very fragile indeed. Can sympathetic intelligence and wisdom — wisdom precisely about such trust — sit alongside deep selfishness and a capacity to abuse? Well, yes, sometimes I think it can.

Whether or not it’s the relevant truth in this case — I’m not competent to adjudicate, as I say — it seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

I plan to go back to the books, in all respectful caution, and reread and talk about them. They meant a great deal to me as a child, partly because my mother took such joy in them; I’m a grown-up now: I see many things differently. What’s gained, and what’s gone lost?

Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. Actually she was RCA’s biggest artist before Elvis arrived and the World Changed™ — but even in all the battle, begun in the 80s really, to rediscover undismissive unconfused perspective on pre-Elvis time, nothing apparently re-centred Eartha where she belongs in it.

Not sure how de-confusing it is, but there’s a very intriguing interview with Kitt in Vol.One of RE/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Music”, where she casually demolishes pretty much EVERYONE’s received cartography of values and politics and pop. Certainly she stomped all over LBJ’s notions of the politics of pop: in 1968, Lady Bird Johnson had invited her (along with 50 other women working in various communities across the nation) to the White House, to discuss what black kids want, and what could be done about it. And Kitt told her: in terms she apparently never expected to hear, from a mouth and a compass-point she was (one imagines) quite unaccustomed to processing. So yes, Kitt at that time belonged — as the White House promo department had judged — to a passing age of Las Vegas-y mainstream entertainment, still hugely popular but very much NOT the standard-bearers of the rising young rock-focused political wave. So what was causing riots in urban neighborhoods, Kitt was asked: Vietnam, of course. Reward: being made presidential persona non grata, and banishment from the US light-entertainment universe for many years.

Her fame had started outside America, and she didn’t need its unoffended custom to thrive: in fact she’d spent the years after the war on the left bank in Paris, in the kinds of dives that James Baldwin and and Jean Gabin and Sartre and de Beauvoir could doubtless be found. And well, even setting aside this handily existentialist self-education, the pop-cultural mainstream that rock was busy scorning was surely at least as just as fascinatingly uneasy and complicated in its wit and seemingly shallow opulence as any of the noisier pop that followed, muffling it.

Thursday’s Child is the 1957 LP that “Just an Old-Fashioned Girl” comes from, and it’s the LP my dad had at home (and I have now). It’s a concept album — as so many 50s LPs were — but there’s a sophisticated wit, a subtlety of the unspoken to the concept that’s an unfathomable distance from anything we seemingly habitually associate with this term today. The title phrase comes from the old nursery rhyme: Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s full of grace, and so on. Thursday’s has “far to go” — and the LP is presented as a succession of places Eartha’s been and what she’s seen, dance troupes and night-clubs in New York, Hollywood and Vegas, but also Paris, Istanbul, south and central America. And it’s genuinely an “album” — that’s to say a selection and cross-section of unexpected styles of song, a succession of snapshots and atmosphere — that take us from the delicate, intelligent, definitely somewhat threatening vixen on the cover (shades of Roxy Music) back into the past that made her. Exotic imagined glimpses of the bohemian life and loves of a dancer or singer — of the kind of interzone that gets called “transgressive”, at least by writers determined to drive all joy and energy from the world — further conjoined with an an extract from EK’s first autobiography, also called Thursday’s Child, printed on the reverse of the sleeve (and blurrily reproduced below). As you can read, it’s an intensely evocative passage about Kitt’s mother (a displaced sharecropper, part black, part Cherokee), leading through two barefoot children through the South Carolina night, trying to find somewhere they can all sleep safely. EK was fathered by rape, by the white son of the owner of the farm she was born on — and more or less completely disowned by future stepfathers. As a child she was often dismissed as the ‘Yella Gal’ and — as she wrote and often noted — spurned on all sides; and so she ran away to all the world, to punish all such tiny-minded local bigotry, by becoming an inescapable global success.

Part of the thread of this possibility you can trace via Kitt’s conductor-producer for Thursday’s Child: a New Yorker called Henri René, French mother, German father, musical director for the international wing of RCA Victor from the late 30s, leading his own orchestra from the 40s, he’s best known today — better known than she is in some places — as a pioneer of the “bachelor pad” mode of wittily arranged, lushly recorded music (in “living stereo”), a sequence of LPs released across the 50s, their titles alone a muddled key to the story: Paris Loves Lovers; Passion in Paint; Music for Bachelors (cover feat.Jayne Mansfield in a negligee); Music for the Weaker Sex; Compulsion to Swing; Riot in Rhythm; Listen to Henri Rene (Dynamic Dimensions; Portfolio for Easy Listening; In Love Again; Melodic Magic; White Heat (ha!); and Swinging 59….

The wit is a deeply musically informed wit — the strength and allure of the LP is its breadth, as much as anything — and the “lushness” a very deft use indeed of new-found studio possibility, so that orchestration has a precision and 3D stereo presence in and around the singer. Kitt switches between personas and deliveries and the arrangements do likewise, cinematic jumpcuts that juxtapose, undercut, gather and playfully debate, ironise — “ironise” in an important way, that’s so common in 40s and 50s film, that doesn’t necessarily have a jargon term, at least when it’s deployed in non-film music, where the “soundtrack” amplifies the emotion of a scene or an action or a section in a story by being its exact opposite.

(The classic example comes from Hitchcock: the circus music rising to a loud climax during a nasty murder at fairground’s edge: the sound obscures and distracts from the material nastiness of the story, and — one step back — foregrounds the unconcerned happy world as it carries on having fun only yards away, which of course means that as viewers — two steps back, as it were — we’re complicit in these two clashing worlds, and thrown doubly hard against the pathos of the victim by sharing the last sounds she hears, and recognising her solitude…)

The layered, lush, learned irony here is an invocation — as much as anything else — of the ugly side of a woman’s success in this kind of world: and this is the use of irony I want to stress here — the conscious, amused, wise adult alertness to the fact that every one of us is embedded in conflicting worlds and roles and perspective, torn between loyalties and obligations we agree, for the sake of moment-by-moment social enrichment, to share and acknowledge. This is where the intensity and horror of Hitchcock’s irony arrives, because it demonstrates how often we fail to negotiate a settlement between clashing worlds; but this is also where the release and dark joy of Eartha Kitt’s irony operates, which insists that sometimes we can, and it’s thrillingly and heartening when this happens — just look at her!

Let’s get back to to ‘Old Fashioned-Girl’, a song that meets the contradictions of past and present head on, and playfully explores the way role-play suffuses our response to both. Or we can dig sideways a bit more — noting for oblique confirmation that René’s White Heat, made for Imperial after he left RCA, includes a version of the Woody Woodpecker themetune: and actually this (of all things) brings us back . Because the best comparison I can make for the image stream in “Fashioned” is decadence-era Tex Avery: as he eased himself away from the nihilistic anarcho-libidinal energy of his earlier cartoon shorts, the director made a group of animations that seem somehow to predict (and tease) the Bachelor Pad set, even though they’re not more than streams of quickfire visual puns, each at once cutely witty and instantly forgotten, an affectionate giggle at modern market culture as pure silly cornucopia: The House of Tomorrow; the Car of Tomorrow; the Farm of Tomorrow; and TV of Tomorrow

“I want an old fashioned car, a cerise Cadillac/
Long enough to put a bowling alley in the back”

“I like the old fashioned flowers, violets are for me/
Have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany”

“Our little home will be quaint as an old parasol/
And instead of carpet I’ll have money wall to wall“

The arrangement’s terrific: a dense harpsichord clatter bouncing behind her, as speed-read gesture at the “olden days” (and at more recent craft-enclave opulence: Wanda Landowska playing Bach on harpsichord had been released as an album of 78s in a pioneering subscription issue before the war, the cognoscenti paying upfront for a quality document that would never have received mainstream release). She sings the words bell-clear, enunciating like a guide to elegant ways to speak, as the words spool out, relentlessly, into an impishly self-mocking cartoon of material-girl cupidity, Avery-style images as sung sight-gags (“I’m just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel/Watch me in Las Vegas while I’m at the spinning wheel“). The fold-over irony of the role she plays not so much straight as a wide-eyed and coolly understated innocence, holding your gaze, challenging you to call her on it all. As emphasis on the elegance there’s even just trace of a mimicked accent when she sings “Old” — and it reminds you how hard it is to guess or hear her own real accent anyway; her default mode isn’t not quite as wildly mutable as Nicki Minaj, say, but nevertheless they’re soul-sisters.

Eartha was hot and she was witty and quick, and her voice darts across backdrops of cartooned identity; a knowing actress flickering between roles, momentarily sketching them, chuckling about them, chuckling at you so fascinated by the growling codeshifts, as we’d call it today. “Old Fashioned Girl” is a portrait of a type — impishly material-girl in the way it mocks cliches of piety — but it’s self-mocking too, mocking the type, mocking the performer sketching the type, mocking the audience the performer has in the palm of her paw, mocking the need for the relationship we’re all in, in contrast to… what?

Mocking cliches of piety — maybe this is why Kitt seem to sit so resolutely outside the legacy of “soul” as a singer, and only somewhat overlaps with jazz (I have a rather nice 1991 LP with a stupid title, Eartha Kitt: Thinking Jazz), no more part of its canons than (say) Louis Prima. Anyway, as we can see — to return to particulars from airy and confusing generalities — Kitt’s sensibility was never about the fetish for some idealised cultural home-space blessedly free from roleplay or powerplay or the erotics of hierarchy. Nor (of course) should anyone’s idea of soul or jazz have been, but somehow the UK factions in the post-punk critical generation worked together to effect exactly this: perhaps the single greatest failure of this era was our collective inability to open up a language and an ethos that encompassed the new music in front of us, the post-Elvis tradition, and a grown-up non-symbolic understanding of soul, of jazz-as-ethos… and of everything Eartha seems to carry about her, on this LP above all.

RE/Search were attempting with this particular collection and its 1994 follow-up to re-purpose several lost strands of music, from electronica to what became known as loungecore, and venturing in the process a little clumsily through the usual stages of a re-evaluation: between a forgotten and a rediscovered pleasure lies an awkward stretch of ambiguously evolving attitude, easily tagged (and dismissed) as “ironic” or “guilty”. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kitt fell into this area for them: as a collective RE/Search had travelled from old-skool west coast punk-rock ‘tood (the zine was then called Search and Destroy) via Ballardian Industrial Culture (which was fascinated with celebrity and mediation and muzak and such figures as Martin Denny) to its not-very-clear slightly self-congratulatory 90s identity, which embraced tattoos, scarification, circus freaks, and the “Angry Women” project (which Kitt fairly easily belonged in, truth to tell). The “irony” this kind of project risks having imposed on it is a feeble ghost of the mode that Hitchcock or Kitt are so confidently deft within and so unsettling deploying: you see the generous motive behind a title like “Incredibly Strange Music” (to recast something seemingly over-familiar and uninteresting as utterly weird), and yet it’s fairly tricky not also to be feeling that much of this music is really only “Incredibly Strange” if you start from an “Incredibly Self-regarding and Parochial” viewpoint. Which perhaps RE/Search felt its readers mainly did?

(Actually there’s a lot to be written about 90s attempts to resolve the 80s impasse — but I’ve already written quite a lot, and don’t intend to pursue that issue here.) (Phew! and indeed Hurrah! cry the long-suffering FT readers…)

To follow every hint and glint of this music, we have to be drenched in a world that’s gone: I can laboriously patch in some of the relevant backstory, but the labour drags down away at the intended effect. We’ve forgotten too much, if we ever even knew it. Examine the label credit — to chase up the provenance of the songs, which were at some point very deliberately selected and agreed on, even before René’s arrangements were written, and work on the sense of conceptual unity begun — and you’re instantly embrangled in a tangle of typos, long-dispersed modish approval, forgotten events and musicals and names: George Shearing (‘Lullaby of Birdland’) and Marvin Fisher (‘Just an Old-Fashioned Girl’) were well enough known in some circles, as perhaps are Mack David (co-composer of ‘If I Can’t Take It With Me When I Go’) and Murray Grand (co-composer of ‘Thursday’s Child) — but Jean-Piere (sic) Moulin? Who was Mesi Julian? ‘Oggere’ seems to be by the Afro-Cuban composer Gilberto Valdés (the label credits just say “Valdez”), and the “Tabares” of the ‘No Importa Si Menti’ composer-credit may be Baz Tabranes, but who was “Tore”, the sole fragmentary indication of the identity of the composer-author of ‘Fascinating Man’? And has no one else ever sung this song? Really? (Don’t say Falco — only the title’s the same… )

(None of the above is actual real proper historical research, mind you: I didn’t even hunt through my own books, just set off on a few lightning google-trips across the internet — I wanted to out the post up before the actual end of time — so any clues others turn up or already know are very welcome. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” and cast her as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr Faustus: she also crossed over into semi-highbrow Broadway appearances, such as a musical based on archie and mehitabel, called Shinebone Alley, one of the first with an all-integrated cast, which I want to know more about. I’ve gone nowhere near her role as the third Catwoman, as nuttily perfect as Sun Ra’s Batman project, or the free shows she gave to East Londoners, one of which I saw in the very early 80s… )

Which all brings us back, the long route, to the ‘prevarication move’, and how it was I had something I could baffle the older kids with in 1975-ish, even knowing none of this. Something happened in the late 50s and early 60s, a cultural ruin of sorts, and whether you blame Elvis or “rock” or Vietnam or perhaps even the Vegas swing culture that was one victim of the ruin, that’s allowed songs like to be artefacts that hide more than they reveal, and escape more they connect; for performances like this to be mysteries more than they’re windows. Gather together nothing more than the languages Kitt sings in on this LP — Spanish, French, German, some kind of apache street pidgin in ‘Mademoiselle Kitt’, whatever Cuban patois is featured in the sinister and magnificent ‘Oggere’ — and the scattered dance styles that René unifies into his own orchestral voice, and you’d faced, in the end, with the masked pain, which is also very much the mastered pain, of a performer who never had a home to go back to her; whose family are the multicultural band of outsiders of the Josephine Baker orphanage; a smart, highly political girl-pirate, a feminist Vegas showgirl, who made the stage her best trusted place.

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up, as another old-fashioned left banker once wrote.

(Note link also includes MATHEMATICAL FORMULA FOR POP SUCCESS, and other reliable christmas cracker filling material…)

As I gave Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” an easy ten on Tom’s Popular thread I’d probably better expand — as usual, other people’s comments help me think this through, especially when they’re subtly wrong in ways that nevertheless seem self-evidently right. I think Lex is right about the bludgeoning, for example, but not the bludgeonee: and I think wichita lineman is right about the unconvincingness, but entirely wrong about any insincerity. punctum is absolutely correct about the performance as an evasion; the deep question — impossible to answer, essential to explore — being how much of this effect is conscious, how much an unconscious matter of singer’s identification with role.

I’ve alread tied this into the aria in the film Diva: I haven’t the slightest idea whether that film was in Whitney’s head, still less anyone else on the production team, but I think it has useful explanatory value all the same. To prove this I’m going to triangulate it with (i) John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band LP (though haha the two Unfinished Music LPs also totally fit, just go look up their titles when you’ve finished reading this), and (ii) Queen Elizabeth the First of England and Scotland.

So, capsule Bodyguard synopsis: famous (black) singer has affair with (white) agency bodyguard; falls for him. From sense of professional duty, bodyguard ends it — angry singer acts up; finds self in overcomplicated mortal peril, involving jealous unhelpful sister, too many stalkers, and BORING HIJINKS ENSUE (it’s basically an interesting, timely concept — more in a moment- — wrecked by needless misdirection and KEVIN COSTNER). Diva, by contrast: a (white) fan (owner of the only ever tape of the never-recorded (black) opera singer of the title) achieves fantasy of a lovely day’s dalliance with his idol; there’s lots of engagingly flashy business with Parisian and Korean cartoon gangsters chasing him for the tape, and a decidely pervy multiple denouement, in which (among other things) the fan acknowledges his betrayal — recording a woman who repeatedly and publicly said no to all such offers — and makes restitution.

At the heart of both films, the impossibility of love between a royal and a commoner: the black/white element plays very differently in the US (where it was still kind unspokenly taboo) and Paris, where it has the urgency of sanctioned exotica — but in both contexts it’s a figure for potentially unresolveable complexity; a get-out clause, from the categorical imperatives of the romantic happy ending, if you like.

And both films play across the ten-12 years after the murder of John Lennon by a jilted, very genuine (which is to say insane) fan: the decade-plus when the institutionalised rejection of the implicit politics of 60s pop culture — we’re all in this together! — manifested as quasi-political assassination, of arguably its most political face/voice, albeit a face/voice in adamant retirement. This song — whether we take the hater’s reading or the admirer’s — is about the crushing of the pleasant possibility of sustainable dalliance between those of unequal status/attainment. The mechanism delivering this crushing is a rigorously achieved utterly regal monumentality — a monument as a vast, implacable, immoveable acknowledgement of the fact of divine right: a cat may not look long at a king; a commoner may not step out with — because can never comprehend — a blood-royal princess.

Now of course, Whitney — or rather the character she plays, in and out of the film at this point — is only in fact a princess by selection and election, despite the facts of her birth and upbringing (her mother the legendary gospel singer Cissy Houston; also Dionne Warwick’s cousin and Aretha’s god-daughter). Clive Davis signed her to his label (note the name) Arista: this was the election. And millions upon millions of pop fans loved her records more than records by others: this was the selection. Born into the 80s soul aristocracy, she is nevertheless not royalty at all — fast-tracked to the audition, she didn’t simply get a lineage pass through it. She’s a high-end pop-star (or was) by virtue of what she was able to do herself. And of course by virtue of what people believed she would go on to do…

The chart love song is always directed at the star’s lover and/or significant other: the audience. The 60s utopia — and Aretha and Dionne were as caught up in, albeit for different reasons, as ever John Lennon was — was a radical equivalency of its stars with its masses; its leaders with its footsoldiers. By 1970, Lennon was singing “I don’t believe in Beatles” and “The dream is over” and “I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality” — attempting by superstar force radically to scale down his affect, to ordinary-guy freedom and intimate in-bed-together domesticity, shut away from the world and its ten million cameras.

Attempting — absurdly — and of course failing; failing catastophically; failing fatally. The door — opened in the imagination if not in the world — could not be closed, even if Lennon had actually really ever wanted it closed. Dumping and denigrating the Beatles, he was also dumping every one of his fans: and some clung to him all the more passionately for this, and some, maddened, spun off into eternal attack. He managed a brief semi-holiday, a brief househusband pseudo-anonymity — it seemed an age at the time, it was a little over four years — and then in December 1980 the door was forced violently open, forever.

The pall this cast, the social facts bursting through the utopia, was starting to deliver, by the turn of the 90s, a mushrooming of songs, from within the bubble of celebrity, exploring the pathology of celebrity — the pathology of the impossibility of finding equals. Post-punk discussion of pop had meanwhile become extraordinarily crappy at analysing any of this: it had moved from a necessary suspicion of the words and attitudes of the star (“imagine no possessions,” yeah, right, John) through a disdainful kneejerk mockery towards a literal inability to see or hear what was before you, if it emerged from this upper layer. The poster-child for this critical incompetence is the actual former poster-child of winsome 60s trans-racial possibility and escape from the prison of class, Michael Jackson, whose entry to the black pop aristocracy had been marked by a precocious harbinger of this mushrooming, 1982′s “Billie Jean” — by the 90s MJ was really singing about little else but the stupefying crippling diorientating terrifying isolation not just of fame and success, but of the ideals and idealism that genuine fans invested in them, on his up-by-his-twinkling-bootstraps behalf.

And of course, when it came time to find a partner, the only guide — in this unhappy world of manufactured royalty — was the dynastic manoeuvring and politicking of actual old-school royalty in the dying years of Divine Right: to cement who knows what imagined alliance, he married Lisa Marie Presley (if only the Lennon-Onos had had a daughter…) The best alliance a monarch can hope for is with peers — and that always means geopolitics first, helpmeet companionship maybe, possibly, a long long way behind. And we’ve finally reached (ii), and Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth: Cate Blanchett, gradually self-zugwanged after all the masques and parties, into refusal (sometimes execution) of any would-be-consort, the acceptable continental dynasts all giggling idiots or creeps, the sexy risky local not-quite-royal boys all dunderheaded ambition-distortion: any choice will make matters worse, until — for the bitterest reasons of state — the only solution is no choice. In the closing scenes, scenes of grindingly dreadful (old meaning) awe-ful (old meaning) grandeur, Elizabeth self-imposes Jackson-esque mummy-like whiteface, to emerge as England’s Virgin Queen.

The closing scenes of Elizabeth: youtube has actually disabled this embed

Not made for six years, this film can’t have been in anyone’s head: still, Elizabeth is the movie the song best illuminates, prefigures, matches. It’s a song about intense loneliness and devastated renunciation — it’s not, however, really a song at all about the renunciated. (Perhaps this is why it’s become popular at funerals? Those left behind are the ones who have to cope; the dead take care of the dead…) Reasons of state, divine right — these claims to pitiless duty, the necessities imposed from outside — are not available to pop-stars, of course, as pretexts or excuses or evasions. But what Whitney — and any character Whitney is playing — can call on, in the name of self-exculption, self-justification, self-protection, self-delusion, is her talent; her technique. This is what has shaped her life and set her apart; this has burdened her with duties and demands others simply don’t have.

All this last is here: the sense of regality, of dreadful awful majesty of style and skill as a weapon, the sense of renunciation, the sense that her role leaves her the loneliest person of all, that her suffering — thanks to her superior status, thanks to her superior gifts (the latter inevitably, in so ruthlessly meritocratic asocial niche, a figure for the former) — is monumentally vaster than anything you or I or even Kevin Costner might suffer. Of course there’s a sense in which this is a repellent, even (yes) onanistic belief: but WH (playing a role in a film, playing a role in a song) is not (after all) straightforwardly announcing her own political philosophy. It’s easy enough to denounce this as bad behaviour — it’s nothing but a shouty tantrum! — but this doesn’t even slightly make it a bad song or a bad performance; on the contrary, it admits what it purports to refuse, that the magnificent self-denying trolling exactness of the delivery of the character and the character’s self-view is precisely what conjures up such resistance, such seemingly inexplicable pervasive unexamined hate.

The Arrangement:
It’s in fact entirely appropriate that it’s vestigial, like the post-coital existential role of the male deep-sea angler fish (the female semi-absorbs its tiny mate after sex, so that the latter becomes a sad little nubbin on the former’s deep-sea arse). Any arrangement that threatened to matched Whitney for power or technique, or even expressive understanding of the situation, would offer a challenge to the concept of solo majesty. (Music, more than any other, even acting, is the collaborative art; the art that implicitly explores a local collective equality… ) Of course the actual real Whitney was — if not now, then soon — actually casting around for a less horribly tormenting and entrapped self-projection. 1992 is the year that Mary J. Blige arrived, to fashion a far looser, loucher, post-rap model of the soul diva, as a princess of glittering self-manufacture — and Whitney very surely wanted in on such freedoms from princely care, if we only judge by her subsequent real-life travails.

The Bludgeonee:
I don’t at all hear someone joyfully demolishing an inadequate suitor here, unleashing her great and terrible talent at his hopeless uselessness. First this doesn’t really fit the film’s logic at all — Costner after all dumps her — and second, the rigorous formalism of the performance strikes me as the opposite of joy, though I’ll acknowledge a certain nerveless sabre-tooth pleasure in supple-strength-for-its-own-sake. (Brief diversionary explication here: opera is a genre of similarly rigorous formalism, which many many many pop music-lovers are incapably allergic to and baffled by — and no one sane would claim joy is unachievable in opera: but it’s certainly never a consequence of snapshot method acting; the vehicle in opera of mood is the dance of the written harmonies and orchestration, the voice considered as a mastered tool inset within the work as a whole, as a cog in the form… ) (and yes, there is a contradiction here, it’s the basic tension within opera — that the achievement of expressed freedom within the work must be reached at cost of the freedom of its many parts, vocal or instrumental…) (Joseph Kerman wrote a great book about this: Opera as Drama.) I actually think, in his flippant threadpost, that Mr Mark G has most tidily identified the bludgeonee: “I’m off, and it’s not you it’s me. OK thx bye” — it’s a song of high-end, self-involved self-flagellation. The declared bludgeonee is the singer herself. And while Mark’s flippancy deliberately ignores the conscious point of the scale of the tone, I think he exactly hits on the head the distrust many will feel towards such a declaration, however dressed up it is.

The Bombast:
To reiterate: everyone’s who’s using this as the explanation of their dislike is getting turned about, unconsciously recasting the reasons for their impulse to recoil, switching the poles of vulnerability, if you like. And they’re doing this because WH is also doing this; it’s no surprise at all she unleashes a flood of it in those who feel threatened and targeted (because they ARE being targeted). The extreme widespreadness of this reaction is a consequence of the song’s effectiveness, not a consequence of its flaws. It’s a reaction, certainly, against flaws in the singer’s persona’s worldview — monarchists (and monarchs) are wrong about what’s best for the world, and thus ultimately themselves — but a violently dislikeable character is not therefore a badly acted character, or a sign that the drama is ill-conceived (ffs). Anyway, this is NOT bombast, it’s POWER: not raw power, but frighteningly, almost inhumanly controlled power. Power from technique, of course — phenomenal technique — but power also from conscious awareness and deployment of the status this technique has conferred. Power that says I am something you can never be; so “us” shall never arrive… (but I-I-I will always etc…); noblesse oblige or onanistic delusion (maybe these are always the same thing), but what isn’t a delusion is the utter rejection and obliteration of a human-scale possibility, in the name of… well, gimme some truth, as a disenchanted utopian once said. And look, I love Dolly and so should you — she’s enormously shrewd and witty about the faux ordinary-person egalitarianism that structures country music’s ideology of itself, and many many MANY country songs old and new are PRECISELY about fissures in the supposed class continuum, albeit inflected personally, and personably, etc.

The Insincerity:
This critical call (based on oddly conventional assumption about what pop-songs can be about) is simply a mishearing of what’s being declared — which isn’t love at all, but its absurdity. Maybe the persona is telling herself that yes, she actually would be capable of a nice kind of love were she not a queen, in which case she’s fooling herself. Not to adduce it as an error anyone in the thread is making, of course but — just as “black/white” creates a fuzz of problematic excitement and blindness in Hollywood and among Parisian intellectuals — it’s not exactly a borderland where rockwriting has covered itself in perceptive glory, either. A character like Marilyn Manson, a group like Killing Joke, are allowed all kinds of leeway, in respect of books we imagine they’d sorta kinda read, high-end ideas they can plausibly be claimed to be playing with and around, despite exceedingly evident limitations as performers. The idea of intellectual content not only makes up for a lack of musical content: it’s sometimes actively deployed to drive it out. And true, yes, this is not an issue in all rockwriting, but after punk (with its apparent fatwa on the craft of music) it has very much threatened to become the mainstream default. Black performers like Whitney or Michael Jackson or — with more learned grasp of tradition and physical grace and capability in the tips of their fingers and toes and noses (well, OK, not necessarily noses) than any of those they’re ranged against, find this exact wealth of knowledge, understanding, craft and intelligence deployed against them; treated a badge of shame, a sign of — of all things — cultural ignorance and allegedly absence of any speck of adult agency. As if all that black pop — accused, all too often by the professional concern troll, of deserting its roots in soul, old-school R&B, jazz and so on — has ever really been fit to deliver is some ignorably smooth bourgeois adjunct to the happyclappy entertainment diversion dept.

The Intolerable; the Implacable; the Inhuman; duty as ineluctable force of destruction
We are indeed the territory of Joy Division… except where Curtis’s frailties as a person and deep limitations as a singer allow the ordinary unmusical listener a vicarious way into a dabbling feel for these concepts, Houston’s confusions (between her role as a star and the roles she undertakes as a performer, I guess) force us up against a reality; that communication is only sustainedly possible between equals, and that inequality exists. Perhaps unavoidably: small wonder many find it horrible, or some kind of blunder — it’s far more ruthless with utopian pop-culture pieties than anything on Factory ever was.

‘And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’

Saw the John Martin: Apocalypse show at Tate Britain yesterday. Oddly mixed feelings: not disappointment exactly — I think I childishly wanted the big end-of-the-world canvasses to be three times bigger — but a mild sense of deflation alongside the enormous enjoyment. I don’t mind AMAZING SPECTACLE and I don’t mind ACTUALLY QUITE SILLY, and of course (like lovely progrock) JM is very often both, and the astonished ooh! of phantasmagoria is very often followed by a slightly shamefaced giggle (I expect someone can work this up into a critical “symptom of modernity (in a bad way)”, but I think both responses are good critical practice, to be honest… ). But this is the Tate, and I suppose I did want more of a sense of why and how this more-or-less self-taught Northumberland working-class artisan was caught between Big Public Extravaganzas (the large paintings went on tour, this is how he gathered and entertained his public, alongside a good deal of diligent print-making; mezzotints are the spookiest liminal medium) and urgent unreciprocated interest in social works and social spaces. He drew up meticulous blueprints for improving London’s sewerage system and planned its railway systems — but others got the gigs, perhaps because his projects were considered “unrealistic”. In fact if the show had been called John Martin: London’s Parks it would have been just as accurate, on the numbers, even if less people would be visiting (to be ambushed by unexpected armageddon).

And of course he drew some of the first well known dinosaur pictures, in 1838 and 1840: this was vanguard science, whatever it looks like. I’ve long had an obsession when the first dinosaurs entered literary popular culture — Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth wasn’t published till 1874 — and this seems like an important clue.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

Right, 1989′s near-eve of cancellation, in which Eeevil McRe-Incarnate Fenric plays games with the bloodlines of all (local amateur) history until a rematch with the Doctor goes AWRY, but at WHAT COST to TRUST? A hyper-timely-wimely ketchup this, given actual current Nu-Who (apparently: I’m writing this up before I watch last week’s) (and after I watched this week’s). And also anyway an epochal, prescient, witty and fascinatingly and unexpectedly complex and emotionally provocative ep, say some (others: “it’s incomprehensible c0ck”). On hand PLOOS it has Vikings, vampires, vicars (well, Nicholas Parsons as a vicar), cosmic chess, companionly fambly biz, WW2-era computers, code-busting Bletchley Park rehoused near legendary Gothavore bathing spot Whitby, un CURSE LOCALE and AMAZING SOVIET LOVE INTEREST <---- :o :o :o :o On side (so-called) MEEEN00S = Ms Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane; SIR SYLVESTRE McGURNSALOT; fx budget of 15 and one quarter pee. And so, since the plot claims to untangle itself by working backwards, backwardsly let us trip and troll through these claims

i: emotionally provocative — i refer readers to this ancient post, and the claim that grown-up emotional complexity was only achieved in Nu-Who. Well, NOT SO, and yet — in another more accurate sense — WAY SO. The ambition of the tangle here — of Ace not only decoy-acting but then getting somewhat slightly horny-broody for/with IVAN SORIN THE SECCHSY and TOO-SOON-DEAD RED (or was this horniness a routine Ace feature?) plus the double loop of her being manipulated (along with everyone else) by McGurnsalot and her aw-so-cuet encounter with her estranged (and unrecognised till too late) mum as a babby — is leagues ahead of the competence of anyone present to realise it, apparently. BUT it’s a strong enough concept, however badly executed, to sit there waiting to be done properly thru all the long sad dusty and yet pre-dusty years of CANCEL.

ii: fascinatingly and unexpectedly complex — see above, re the concept of ruthless ep-long Doctorly untrustworthiness in a good-ish cause (saving the world; being cruel to Ace); the plot as a kind of chess problem for the viewer to solve retroactively (and in my case unsuccessfully: this show was made in the age of video but was it yet the age of being aware that a show could be rewatched multiple times and decoded? Certainly I did not watch with this in mind, and as a consequence think I missed a lot ofr what was going on. viz I assumed the Soviet soldiers were Scands (ie modern vikings) for half the show (tbf their accents were fkn drettful). Actually there are a lot of forces being moved around: three rival armies, no less, and the Doctor and Ace provisionally in allegiance with all of them at some point (when the Doctor was even in allegiance with Ace).

iii: witty = characters that are somewhat topsytuvy: a Good and Brave Red vs a WW2 Brit who works in a replica of Hitler’s office, and — when that turns out to be a bit of a misdirect — helps re-embody FENRIC himself, who fashions bloodlines to make the world evil; the narrowly dogmatic landlady who is QUITE RIGHT THAT SWIMMING IS DANGEROUS and will send maidens to hell (the hell of being goths with long fingy-nails); the namby-pamby am.historican vicar who delivers a trite biblical text which reveals as KORREKT MILITARY SCIENCE in terms of the narrative (the codeword is love and the cure is faith); and the Oldest AND UGLIEST Haemovore who sacrifices himself (and i think the rise of his entire race to earth-prominence) to off Fenric. And poor old Ace discovering that her being helpful and trusting is a catastrophe, planwise.

iv: prescient (see ii re multiple video-rewatch as a modality); see i re McGurnsalot the ice-cold manipulator (and hence hullo Matt…)

v: epochal… is this true? Does it in fact signal the shift to the idea of Nu-Who, right there on the eve of the “Michael “Fenric” Grade shut-down. Is it the nearly botched birth of a nu-concept, a decision to go for grown-up and morally shaded, with approximately none of the tradecraft machineries required to achieve this, actorly especially? Not to mention a long-game time-villain story salted with jigsaw-piece elements from all the ages.

vi: syl and dotty are, i’m afraid, lifelong contrarian tho i be, quite hard work to watch. Sophie Aldred is, I’m told, incredibly charismatic in person, the obvious star of any room she’s in IRL: and it’s true to say and fair to say she has terrible script-material to work with (brilliant bolshy teen nerd misfit who is koolest in skool, and — more to the point — out of it)… the grisly attempt at a seduction scene (ok, it’s VERY FUNNY and i LARFED, but it is funny for cheeky daring in the face of eddie-the-eagle technique i ph34r)

vii: fess-up time, I watched this a bit tired and distracted just the once, and despite 14 pages of notes, think i missed a lot of the most relevant material (hence clue: it was HARDLY EVER THE DIALOGUE!!): and this is my first ever propah ep-length encounter with Ace or McGurnsalot, and so i have no previous work of theirs to compare them to (except that SM plays Lt Birdie Bowers in the TV version of The Last Place on Earth, the Scott of the Antarctic story) (which is kinda no help in any direction). And my Tardis-esque jumping-about-the-broadcast-order approach is unhelpful here too: I felt (after I had dispatched it back to LoveFilm) that there’s been a conscious effort to work in elements from the adventure-feel of EVERY Doctor. I can check off Pertwee/ Troughton (sea-beasts and the military), Hartnell (historicals), and Davison (raveled moebius time-conundra): but I feel less confident summarising the Bakers (let alone Whiggy McGurnsalittle), to check them off too.

All in all, I strongly felt I did not get out of this all I could — but equally felt no huge impulsion to rewatch particularly soon.

7 Sept 9:13am: yes i am rereading the book (again): i don’t much like the thursgood stuff, it’s too cutesy, and the encountering martindale scene is an incredibly clunky exposition move, smiley spends the whole chapter being “i am annoyed at you telling me all this stuff i already know (but too polite and sad and lonely to say so)”

7 Sept 10:28am: a few pages further in, i’m prepared to forgive him the martindale exposition stuff, it’s a kind of a graceful sacrifice of the novelistic high ground to ensure that the guillam/tarr sections that straight away follow aren’t tainted by too much necessary backstory that isn’t directly tarr-related

7 Sept 10:37am: inc. a nicely blunt bit of lampshade hanging: “an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with martindale in the club, now again with guillam in a dream”

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

7 Sept 12:56pm: halfway thru the tarr inquisition which is terrific — except maybe the stuff that irina’s is sposed to have written on toilet paper, which is a bit [insert plot-point here] [using lady] [consults manual of lady-fashioning]

7 Sept 3:16pm: went on a hunt to discover when exactly the story is set — irina says the “ultra-reactionaries” are back in power in westminster (= ted heath presumably!) and smiley notes that the war is 30 years ago: TTSS was publiushed in 74, so that makes it 1970-73 i guess anyway what i found instead was suggestions who characters were likely based on, which i’d never pursued before (caveat: i think jlc was always stayed coy, which is fair enough)

connie = milicent bagot <-- oddly sad about this, it diminishes connie not to be made up, somehow
smiley = maurice oldfield <-- unconvinced by this claim, think smiley is organically a fictional evolution
haydon = kim philby <-- this is interesting, and maybe more plausible, but it does strange things to the time line, basically extending/ shunting a mid-50s story into the early 70s

but actually one of the strengths of the novel is the sense of stuff spilling from an earlier era into a later time: of half the characters as weird left-overs in an era they totally don't understand (jlc is always a bit hopeless actually depicting the modern world, less so at depicting the flailing melancholy of the middle-age not knowing how to negotiate it

7 Sept 11:43pm: after the school opening and the martindale exposition, the three successive actual-real thriller sections are pretty flawless: the tarr debrief, guillam cases the circus, and smiley visits connie — there’s a lot of storytelling going on in the first and the last, the only time this falters, as noted, is when tarr’s reading irina’s journal, he tells his own story well but jlc can’t find a plausible written voice for her; and the connie section is probably one of the best things her ever wrote (maybe why he tried to top it in smiley’s people); guillam in the circus is actually really a way to introduce the opposition as real people, the mcguffin to get him there is negligeable, and meant to be i’m halfway through smiley’s research-and-memory binge now, less successful i’d say, though it pulled one stunt of “reading so deep you forget where you are and being reminded of your surroundings with a start”, where smiley does this and jlc causes you to as well, that was neat — the setting, the crappy little hotel near paddington, is two notches too cartoonish and mimsy

haha i am actually sick of the ann counter-plot already

7 Sept 11:48pm: “there’s a lot of storytelling going on” — haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

8 Sept 10:44pm: TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we’re meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you) (albeit largely as cover): we know that something happened to him, not exactly what yet [as of p. 162] except he was shot in the shoulder in czecho <-- smiley doesn't really know much of it at this point [p.162] either one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is: obviously i've known for something like 30 years -- jlc treats him with kids gloves AND lampshade hangs wildly all about him; that's to say smiley is overly bothered in effect by how the story is treating gerald (this is largely what bothers me about the ann stuff i think: the extent to which it's ONLY distractional sleight- of-hand -- one thing guinness manages no better than jlc is making the smiley-ann marriage remotely believable, actually, even tho siân phillips makes ann believable; in a sense we keep reading i suspect because we want to crack this mystery, but are left basically clueless) (as clueless as smiley, yes, DO YOU SEE, but that's a bullshit move, really )

the entire novel is smiley's atonement for the death of nan [= liz in the book], yes: a long and elaborate proof that nothing nasty he ever formerly had responsibility for was actually really his fault, it is all totally at karla’s door

8 Sept 12:51pm: haha one of the suspects (…) refers to the relevant americans as “puritan fascists” = a pretty good description of the deeply lunatic angleton

8 Sept 1:10pm: just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW — this is even better than the first one, because it’s all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn’t meant to know i’m not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute- playing hippie gf — perhaps bcz the gap between michael jayston’s version and jlc’s renders his inner life somewhat wonky (this is much less true in smiley’s people, where jlc had once again adapted the character to its on-screen portrayal, and guillam is married with a kid in paris) — but these scenes are tremendous for nerves, tension, not knowing what will happen next etc, someone interloping in a very familiar space, having to seem who he ordinarily is when he no longer is, being himself (very aware that he’s out-of-the-loop and appropriately testy about it, yet at the same time not so capable they spot he knows something he oughtn’t) (a modelled microcosm of Gerald’s inner life, in fact; nice work)

the section before, smiley plunging deeper and deeper into the files, woke up towards the end when he moves off reminiscence into parsing actual secret files he’d never before viewed: finally being a desk- bound research agent, intelligence office as historian-critic, if you like, picking up clues via finance, location and his target suddenly becoming human and throwing a long-ago-and-far-off tantrum

8 Sept 1:22pm: during his reminiscences, smiley actually develops a THEORY about hayden, who will turn out to be the mole, not that smiley realises this yet (OR DOES HE?) and how he relates to all those around him — that they’re all botched copies of him, and that he can only be himself jigsawed out of all those round him… and actually guillam, in thought and behaviour under foe’s gaze in the circus, seems to attest to the accuracy of the theory, at least re situational judgment and self-handling and stance (he’s being very junior squishy smiley inside, re his gf)

again: nice work, there’s a lot of “hall of mirrors” stuff art work here, which is the intelligence world philby and angleton created

8 Sept 1:59pm: one of the oddities of jlc’s approach is that you never actually learn about ANYTHING concrete a network achieved in the real political world: i realise there’s a fiction-reality problem here, re claims he can make and maintain plausibility, but the effect is to keep the entire back-and-forth hermetic, as if actual real-world politics is left entirely untouched by anything anyone here, karla, control, gerald, smiley, has ever done…

which to be honest i believe it was: it’s like advertising, you have to do because everyone else does it, but its net effect is zero

[comment from noodle vague: "well in that intro above he says that the service shd've been dismantled after Philby, a view he sort of expresses in the Smiley books too iirc, so maybe le Carre agrees with that"]

8 Sept 2:06pm: i was surprised by that actually: i seem to recall him saying something along the lines of “you can take the moral temperature of a country by reference to its intelligence services”, and this does seem to be more or less what smiley believes — but connie certainly says something more along those lines, that this is all an absurd post-imperial indulgence, the little boys with their little toys (she loves her boys and she loves the game but she has no deeper moral view of it)

his view may well have evolved a little though, over the ensuing 35 years!

8 Sept 3:04pm: the idea of a secret service as a nation’s — or that nation’s ruling class’s — dreams of itself is great, i think: and jlc intermittently gets this on the nose — but (like hare) he’s totally bamboozled by thatcherism and murdoch and america and “the 60s” (all connected without going the full carmody), and his dream is set (in his ifction) like ten years after its (irl) sell-by-date

smiley’s people — which is in most ways way more of a fantasia — actually grips this better, because its central characters are actual- real baltic exiles, so “isolates trapped in the amber of loss” is always going to be the Real they’re battling

9 Sept 10:30am: ok, quite a chunk to roll out here: runnng order of larger sections is tarr, karla, sam collins, max, jerry westerby, haydon recruits prideaux

the reinterrogation of rikki tarr and smiley’s tale to guillam about his one meet with karla are the book’s plateau of moral-highgrounding for smiley: there’s a small element of plot advancement and backstory infill but they’re mainly given over to smiley’s technique as an interrogator, at his best now in the approaching evening of his life, and not at his best trying unsuccessfully long ago to persuade karla to save his skin and defect — key to both, his success with tarr and his failure with karla, is smiley’s kindness and humanity (implication: our foes are ideologues and fanatics and this is the flaw that will end them) (a prayer more than a fact, you might say: certainly not immediately relevant to what actually ended the USSR, though this hadn’t yet happened in 1974 and jlc was hardly alone in not seeing it coming)

(and yes, it’s true that tarr gets thumped some more — morality is messy! — and also true that wily smiley is more approving of tarr’s canny self-interest and truth-witholding than callow guillam)

then there’s a bit with little bill roach having nightmares and being ill ftb the divorce-bogey is a-comin for jim and a section where smiley and lacon meets the minister (which is irredeemably borng necessary tale-business and i have to clap my jaw not to skip: it’s extremely short so jlc feels the same, obv)

collins/max/westerby: again, minor elements of plot advancement and backstory infill in all three — basically smiley seeks them out and quizzes them, the first two as per info discovered in his research — but the real point of the three encounters is moral colour, i’d say… to give a live sense, as supplied by outsiders to the story, of the chaotic feel inside the circus during control’s last project (collins); of the feel of prideaux’s operation, max (a czech DP) being with him for the early, less troubled reaches; and, most likeably (jlc likes alkies and writes them pretty well), the feel in the world immediately beyond and outside the circus at the crucial time (westerby is a jobbing sports journo who supplies the service with information he happens on, less an agent than a sympathetic conduit)

you very much feel with all three that they’re present in this story for the one scene, to tell their tale and supply their colour- perspective and depart our necessary attention. collins and westerby are arguably the better characters, certainy more memorable, if not especially deep — max is a bit exile-by-numbers (there’s an incredibly similar character in smiley’s people whose name i forget: the max in smiley’s people being smiley himself!), tho his role is largely to impress on the reader how a non-communist czech might feel about all this stupidity (=very pissed off); westerby of course also goes on to be somewhat rebooted in (and as) the “honourable schoolboy”, which if i recall accurately wears the character beyond thin in a context jlc isn’t well-suited to portray (post-colonial hongkong and south east asia in the late stages of the vietnam war) — collins is also brought back, for smiley’s people, in a faintly demeaning role

and then there’s the trip back to old documents, and a reread of the young hayden introducing the young prideaux to the service: interesting little bit of spite and uncharacterstic semi-virtuoso tradecraft on jlc’s part — the young hayden writes (i) like a posturing fey student, and more ambitiously (ii) like a clever young man very infected by kipling’s sense of rhythm and irony and pseudo- cynical masked self-certainty. The kiplingism is good — pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling’s kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

Seems to me by the end of the collins section, one of the main suspects has begun to scream out at the reader. But it’s very hard indeed at this late stage to reconstruct virgin-reader status.

9 Sept 10:44am: ^^^spite bcz this is the first time we see hayden clear — ie not through a haze of hero worship and/or hurt fury — and there’s no way he pulls either trick on the reader, with the prose we get to read; except you can’t help also thinking “no fair, d00d was still a student! hope no one ever judges ME on stuff i wrote as a student ect ect”

also there’s a nice little sketch of the boho-bolshevik student party hayden and prideaux, lifted wholesale as far as i can tell from a similar one in dorothy sayers’ strong poison (i’ll look this up)

9 Sept 11:430am: (ok it’s less like the sayers than i remember — the actual phrase i thought he’d lifted was :”a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun” <-- i'm certain this is from sayers somewhere, it's very wimsey-ish, but it's not in this particular scene)

(and again, the idea that it's hayden doing the lifting is astute: sayers a very popular novelist in the 30s)

9 Sept 4:02pm: i’ll say more on the prideaux debrief in a bit — think i want to reread it, as it’s point where backstory and current narrative finally get in step with one another — but here’s a note on jlc’s tradecraft as regards location (mise en scene theory/pathetic fallacy alert)

the various tale-relating conflabs smiley has had have been in very different places — some directly emanating from the person being quizzed, like connie’s jericho flat or the casino sam collins now works at — but in almost all he’s been in effect the authority figure: the actual interrogator for tarr, callow guillam’s guru when it’s the karla backstory, the returned agent with ministerial backing… and the places do their work amplifying the way this inflects, from tarr’s cramped hotel room (where he’s more or less a prisoner for the time being) through to the curryhouse where he gently pumps jerry w (where in a sense they’re equals — smiley gives very little away — and it’s really only westerby’s puppyish semi- lachrymose need for approval that undergirds the power relationship

but with prideaux, the setting is not a built room, public or private, furnished or functional-anonymous, but the wild hilly outdoors of the south west: as — in effect — demanded by prideaux; and smiley has no power he can really seriously bring to bear… prideaux could basically snap his neck with a single blow and hide smiley’s body and who’d really be any the wiser?

jlc is good at compact and evocative descriptions of places: his london streets are very often real streets he’s accurately portraying, and i imagine his countrysides are too (it’s not a part of the UK i know); but he’s also good at letting the sense of the space be a felt manifestation of the encounter — the strength of the main part of the smiley-prideaux scene is that it’s the first (and last) point in the book where things feel almost open-ended, so that you judge that prideaux chooses to spill

9 Sept 4:08pm: adding: it’s not just that everyone’s equal outdoors — whereas indoors is always indoors somewhere, a building structure unavoidably embedded in an extant power structure — but that prideaux the sporty man of action is more than smiley’s equal here, and both know it, and placing himself here is the gesture of total vulnerability by which smiley elicits prideaux’s trust

10 Sept 10:42am: anyway, the prideaux hilltop debrief:

it comes in three sections, first the circus where control laid out the operation, last the various cells where, operation blown up in everyone’s face, hajek aka ellis aka prideaux tried to screen as much/ many as possible for as long as possible, before he was (inevitably) broken; and in the middle, one of the climactic passages in a book full of wary spies moving through dangerous places: a seemingly utterly english agent rendering himself effectively invisible in czech streets stiff with watchers who know he’s there

once again the sense of place is ever-present: jlc’s tradecraft is, in effect, to heighten a character’s watchfulness by a kind of transferred descriptionalism — as if his own gift for conjuring up locale swiftly and effectively is a manifestation of the character’s heightened observational level… to be told you’re a “watcher” is a compliment of the highest order, so naturally jlc allows the reader to get to share this quality, or to feel they’re sharing it

prideaux is described, physically, as “crooked” and even “fanged” — as a jaggedly palpable, noisy presence in the world — yet (like smiley) his deep gift is to become invisible in plain sight; invisible, moreover, to his professional peers/foes when they’re most expecting it… this middle passage of his tale is a guide to this, a guide to the superb level of detailed observation and anticipation it requires… and, also i think, to underscore that the core being of this seemingly brusque military sporty type is an uttertly gentle quietness: watchfulness is the centre of his being (ditto smiley; ditto smiley’s little child phantom bill roach)

there’s a weird passage early on, put in the mouth of lacon and thus easily overlooked as point-missing blather: lacon raises the notion that “method is morality” and then projects onto smiley the assumption that smiley can’t and won’t accept this idea.

well, for starters it’s an ambiguous formation: and it’s easy to just assume — this is lacon speaking, for one thing — that’s merely the situational ethos of the high-end civil service (“i do my job to the best of my ability, to aid my political masters, through every change of government: hence even if they’re utterly in the wrong, i can be in the right”)

but it might also mean “your morality emerges from the method you choose” (as contrast smiley’s interrogation technique from the evil soviet one: smiley deploys far less thumping, if not none, and no electronic probes, hence is “better”, as far as moralists are concerned)

and there’s a third meaning, much subtler and in a sense subversive, i think, of the book’s stated sense of good and evil (which does function as an argument between these first two readings): this is the notion that to be true to your method (your technique, your skill, your craft, the still zen of your art blah blah) is to be true to the world

and in this central passage — when prideaux is being the best street agent in the book so far — he is truer to the world than any of the botched or confused reasons why his operation has been set in place (by control, or though the deceived control by the mole, or by the clashing forces of world history, or what have you: every other level is botch, compared to prideaux in the middle passage of Operation Testify, its failure notwithstanding)

the point is, i don’t think jlc dares put his trust in this reading: whether this is cause or consequence, he’s just not that strong a writer — he’s a writer with strengths, and with flaws, and the flaws always muscle back in (one of his strengths, though, is that he can often deploy his flaws as masks; just as a good spy — or more to the point a good thriller writer — must be able to)

[i've actually finished -- the sections following this one are "unputdownable", his sense of pace and momentum at its best -- but i'll try and pace my blogging in haha homage]

10 Sept 4:46pm: as noted, the prideaux sections sees the backstory and the current story slide into consonant lock-step, which means that everything that follows derives its momentum from (i) waiting for that actual whodunnit reveal, and (ii) events and activity caused by the consonance of backstory and current story, and what it impels people to scurry about doing

so far so ho-hum, this is a spy thriller with a whodunnit theme — the value if you like of what remains of the story is how (ii) can screw around with (i), to make it more than routine poiroteesque grandstanding, the brilliant detective explaining how everything fits and pointing the quiveringly melodramatic finger at hans redacted moleman

jlc does this very neatly, by moving the “explanation of how everything fits” early, to scare a suspect he appears already to have cleared into switching sides: i have to say despite close rereading i don’t quite get why this particular suspect has been cleared, mind you — which i think is a mark of jlc’s own very cunning knot, whereby EVEN THOUGH SMILEY EXPLAINS HOW EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER it doesn’t make it much easier to go back and intricately re-examine any given plot point from the new perspective… because of course it’s always a double-perspective, a hall-of-mirrors everything-pulled-inside-out- perspective, where such-and-such a cover-story as supplied by yr bosses in london (or moscow) is actually the REAL story

anyway, this particular scene features toby, who as i say is easily my favourite character: and one of the things i love is how smoothly he adjusts to this catastrophic new understanding, and switches sides: smiley’s mastery of the story in more detail than most readers quite grasp — meaning that we cede smiley and jlc an element of trust as to the precision, which we feel more than we apprehend — is enough to turn toby; and — even tho he’s kind of victim of the scene, toby is actually granted a lot of professional respect, and not just for sleight-of-hand… it goes without saying that he’s a mastercraftsman of lamplighting, babysitting, pavement artistry etc etc, whichever side he’s being run by, or duped by. (Except not in fact “without saying”: bcz it’s relentlessly acknowledged and stressed.)

There’s a term used in Smiley’s People — by toby descriptively of smiley’s tactics after a certain point — which it claims is untranslateable, and then translates faintly dodgily. It’s from German military phraseology: flucht nach vorn — and literally means “flight to the front”, but in military context means something more like “escape via the Front”, ie a defence against attack that consists itself of unexpected attack. But it also has more than a smidge of “leap into the unknown”, again as a tactic.

Anyway, that’s relevant to this scene — smiley is getting things going by making his completed theory an engine of events — but with the proviso (not yet filled in with clarity) that someone/something else is also active in this unknown. We’ve had as many hints — just as we have with the actual identity of the mole — but they’re still masked, at least to careless and semi-careful reading. The giveaway is a single word.

11 Sept 1:00pm: So now — at quite a lick — we pass towards turning the molerunning system against itself to unmasking denouement to aftermath, as the events set running by the coming into consonance of the backstory and the present-times narrative intrude on smiley’s intended conclusion

waiting in the safehouse for it all to kick off is good strong anticipatory mood-music — including a nice turnabout scene where mendel watches the actual circus itself from across the road at cambridge circus (i once spent 20 minutes wandering around there trying to decide which building he can have been watching from, as he needs simultaneously to be able to see the circus itself, including the roofs above and behind the pepperpot tower over new compton street AND the theatre)

the unmasking that follows is a pretty effective portrayal of anti- climax; serious as the implications are, the action itself is borderline farce, powerful men reduced to flapping nobodies, petulant or stunned or totally withdrawn or (in percy’s case) apparently just clueless. except for toby, the secondary suspects — who turn out just to be dupes — were never fleshed out beyond cartoon level; roy bland especially remains a cipher. And gerald/haydon retreats into stoic bored passivity: this above all i suspect shapes the sense of anti-climax; he doesn’t act like a villain, or protest innocence; he doesn’t act like “himself” as we’ve watched him throughout the tale, so we’re robbed of something, even if it’s hardly clear what (perhaps routine poirotism)

smiley debriefs haydon and discovers — more or less nothing: turns out, denuded of the various stages haydon has fashioned for himself, there’s nothing at the heart… the final russian doll turns out to be hollow: haydon gives a cliched political speech one day (jlc doesn’t even bother giving it all, on the excuse that smiley isn’t really listening — treated as craft and deliberate style decision, you’d have to note that any mid-level brit stalinist on the stump in 1970, when there were still a LOT of them, could have given a less crappy account of the ideals haydon claims to be upholding; we also get to find out that his lovelife is mean and lame; that his paintings are no good any more; that’s there’s nothing there

(talking about moscow, smiley says that they won’t humiliate great britain over this, because it’s in their interests to allow their foes to seem worth taking on: so what does this observation say about smiley himself, and the lifefacts beneath the molereveal?) (i’m reasonably sure jlc is aware of this irony of course: indeed that it fits into his whole OH THE HUMANITY litany, which smiley tends to ventriloquise for him)

and then, in the last few pages, the basically horrid and squalid surprise conclusion: when jim p kills bill h: as i saw the TV version before i read the book, this was no kind of shock — i’m interested in how it comes across to virgin readers (even though we are somewhat in CHRIST ON THE CROSS SPOILERS territory here surely)

Another very deliberate irony: a key consequence of this conclusion ensures that prideaux loses moral high ground firmly established (over Smiley et al) as Smiley heard his tale earlier in the book. (The post-it note sentence here having been: “Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.”) <-- ans = because they were more of a rigmarole than we at the time supposed; as now at last emerges... final very bitter irony; also final OH THE HUMANITY thumb- on-the-scale if this is an element yr allergic to...

Which it may well be: I don't want to belabour it, but my threefold reading of "method is morality" seems to me finally to hover over the characters we're encouraged at the end to be thinking of, and through: haydon obv, now forever an enigma; prideaux, broken and betrayed, and back at thursgood's, learning to forget; and smiley himself, also much betrayed (tho honestly ann's behaviour is NOT a parallel with bill's if yr actually sane)... and of course, since all three are characters jlc has put a lot of time and love (and some hate) into, which is he saying is most him also? He far too obviously hopes smiley; he far too obviously fears haydon. And Prideaux is masked when visible; and most himself when not? Are novelists street agents or desk agents?

11 September 1:02pm: footnote: as per discussion far far above [i.e. in a section not included here], suspect SOLDIER, roy bland, is a miner’s son who became an academic, and thus the closest to a non-middle-class contributor to the central tale

11 September 12:12pm: Haydon “also took it for granted that secret services were the only measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.” <-- actual quote on p306, 11 pages from close

So I was wrong above, it's not JLC saying this, and nor is it his oft-times pained and sententious mouthpiece smiley, it's the defeated villain in his rambling foolishness. So does this mean JLC absolutely does NOT think this, and indeed thinks it ridiculous to think this? ah-hum: well that is the conundrum really... how much does JLC see himself in the villain as yearning wish fulfilment ("AT LEAST HE HAS A BELIEF SYSTEM!") and how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

Of course we can all be right here, since a novel is not a maths problem: it doesn't have an "answer"

[comment from history mayne: 'well, im pretty sure jlc-the-man isn't a communiss. but i think he probably agrees with gerald about 'the state of britain' today a little. the pigs-in-clover society, sucking up to the US -- that stuff (...) 'a small town in germany' is really hard to fathom, politics-wise. one of the villains, karfeld, is a populist german nationalist politician, but i don't think jlc ever calls him a 'neo-nazi', and there's even some business about him wanting to make an alliance with the SU? in a totally non-communist way. many of his supporters are young people, though, and they don't seem to be particularly nazi neither. wonder if they relate to the hippies in 'smiley's people'."]

12 September 1:48pm: tbf i don’t think this is about politics-as-grand-narrative-ideology, it’s about national and individual praxis: which the individuals and nations grab at labels for, of course, but what interests and concerns him is how people treat other people, not so much how they tribalise this <-- so far so wishywashy liberal maybe, hence his constant flagellation that he can't lay hold of an aggregate formulation, and conflcted envy of those who can

gerald's self-disclosure at the close is intentionally a chaotic unself-aware adolescent mess: even if gerald would describe himself as a marxist or whatever, JLC doesn't allow him the dignity of passing the description on to the reader...

Two threads run though my friend Marcello’s The Blue in the Air: one’s a fear, rarely directly stated; and the other’s a trust, a implicit confidence, a gamble. Between them, these oblique stances, very different but very connected, lure or impel us through an astonishing maze of music, much of it very likely unfamiliar, from radical free improv to one-off novelty pop, via every imaginable sheeptrack or rat-run or scenic bus ride…

Blue collects Marcello’s commentaries on 50 records, written over 12 and a half months in 2007-08 (or actually 150-odd records; or — truthfully — 150,000 and counting): it’s also (in its sly, understated way) a map of the last 50 years in music (or actually 150, or truthfully…). And I imagine a map of this map could be devised by citing Carlin’s writerly forebears, if that’s a way you like to establish value. Here’s the GMarcusian close-reading, for example: as when he takes us phrase-by-phrase through vocal and arrangement of Kevin Rowland’s 1999 version of ‘This Guy’s in Love with You’, a song written for (but never performed by) Chet Baker, which builds to its final phrase, “if not I’ll just die…” — undiluted melodramatic, of course, which is exactly the kind of melodrama Rowland knows how to unroll in unexpected ways. And there’s the deft Morley-esque deadpan: as when, via the Doors-alike song ‘Endless Tunnel’, the long-forgotten Serpent’s Power’s same-name debut LP is adjudged not the “28th best album of 1967′ but instead the “37th best”.

In this second mode, some silly touchstone of rockchat (the yearly best-of list!) lets us fuse significance with the idiotic, while playfully hinting that in pop (and thus in all of art) they ought never to have been deemed entirely unfused. While in the first, the Marcus-ish close reading, you’re receiving an empirical masterclass in critical observation; how music works, at the level of the phrase, the hinted echo, the drum-beat, the sigh — the puncta, you might almost say, where the praxis of and fissures in an artist’s technique meet the listener’s own often secret story. (The semi-veiled backdrop to this project being profound personal loss, and the rediscovery of the possibility of love; as some know — but it’s worth stressing you don’t need to know this in difficult detail, and nor is this aspect ever more than fleetingly adverted to.)

Also at NME in the early 80s, and one of one of the quieter critical architects of Marcello’s beloved New Pop, was my own subsequent mentor at The Wire, the late Richard Cook — and there’s much Cookian scholarship in Blue, too, including authoritative hinterland exposition of the terminally unfashionable, of forgotten sessions and impossibly minor sidemen, and strange sideways moves from the wilds of free jazz into the bargain-bin bubblegum basement and/or TV comedy-wasteland cash-in cul-de-sac, and (yes!) back. And actually, you know, maybe there’s even a trace of me here too. Marcello’s distrust of cultural parsimony is certainly something I share, and we both reject the cull as any kind of route to understanding; the unwieldy sprawl produced by lack of cull is potentially a world of sudden unlikely but exacting juxtapositions, and this too we share a love of. Though as much as anything it’s just that he cracks jokes I wish I’d thought of (Tight Fit or the New Seekers should INDEED have recorded a version of Stockhausen’s Stimmung… ) (the joke being that this really ISN’T a joke).

At which point I should obviously reiterate my disclaimer, that I know Marcello well, and his wife Lena too, and am proud to have been now and then on hand as they built their current life together, and am exorbitantly delighted that someone’s had the vision to turn Marcello’s tireless blogwork into a book at long last, and a bit sad it’s been overlooked so far by reviewers. And if such attachment and such allegiance are ways you dis-establish and discount value, then actually — probably — this book will be gifting you nothing of enormous consequence anyway: it really really isn’t a great deal to do with any of the myths of cultural objectivity.

Natural as it is, stressing these various writerly comparisons, valid or not, is an easy way to mistake the nature of this project. Blue really doesn’t stands square or simple anywhere in the ordinary line of popwrite. Not least because it cadges no grand historical importance out of claims made for its contents — as most such books must, of course, to sell. Song no.16 in Blue is sung by British popstress Dorothy Squires, her 1970 version of ‘My Way’, released as her lovelife and career began a last long downswing into thrown-over and resentful (not to say litigious) obsessiveness. Very easy indeed for the winners in this life — the young, the smart, the ambitious, the reasonably self-aware — to chuckle a little as they assign quasi-Nietzschean pop-typologies that amount to nothing to hear here, folks…

What’s the importance, after all, of importance? Why do we need things that matter to us to matter to all? And — the real question — how much does it matter how they matter? To grasp the point being made about it in Blue, you almost certainly have to come in, sit down and read Carlin, and then up and track down and go hear Squires, deluded naff loser though she may seem: to shortcut is to shortchange yourself.

Though they’re not at all the same thing, criticism largely currently exists in the exact same space as reviewing, primarily because reviewing is a paying proposition within consumerworld where criticism very often isn’t. “I undertake this so YOU DON’T HAVE TO”: and yet the pre-emptive cull is far more a consumer-driven response to time-poverty under current conditions, than any species of grown-up intellectual response to the material at hand. The critic, with a mortage to pay, internalises the reviewer-pretext, the two disciplines inextricably confused everywhere. Result: a half-and-half practice that most-times battens on and extends excuses for ignorance, bigotry, complacent semi-informed parochialism.

The problem isn’t the instant response-at-the-time — that’s reasonably easy to justify, and has some benefits — so much as the way a certain aggregate response congeals over time into habit-of-certainty. Certainly far too much reviewing — from the high-minded belle lettriste essay or politico-polysyllabic quasi-philosophical long-form study across and down to the conveyor-belt leisure-processing of each new week’s routine of new releases — is essentially supplying its specific public with short-cut excuses NOT to read a book, see a film, plunge into a song or a show. This excuse requiring an armature of discernment, the practice manifesting as the production of the factitious generalised ideal, the critique as quasi-intellectual pre-articulated checklist: the role of outsourced labour-saving sensibility-minion requires you be seen to bin stuff, in quantity…

So jump to No.18, which is Britney’s ‘Heaven on Earth’. Again, the Morley-esque perspective on the value of a chart is at work: 18 isn’t two UP or two DOWN in this list, it’s two ALONG. A gnomically personal narrative is unfolding here, partly via chart-maker’s reason for selection (which may or may not reveal itself: if it does, it arises out of the relationship readers make for themselves with the writer). But there’s also the elaboration of a diagram of juxtaposed values; an extended model of difference, of contrast, of connectivity, of quality arising out of exquisitely positioned plurality.

Let’s unpack this a bit more bluntly. The buried part of the specific juxtaposition-but-one is that the Britney Wars are long won; that she triumphed, actually quite easily (‘Heaven on Earth’ is off the rightly lauded Blackout); and that the commentators who refused to address her seriously on what they imagined was a principle came off looking like idiots, as some of them no doubt ruefully now see. Nothing wrong with being wrong, of course: not least because you get the invaluable opportunity to know what to it feels to be Squires, scorned and forlorn, angrily belting out your prefabricated vindication. For the Britney nay-sayers it wasn’t ‘My Way’, exactly: the preferred standards (off-the-shelf ideas about other people’s reasons liking things they oughtn’t, well or poorly wielded) have names like or fall into phrases like “poptimism”, “post-modernism”, “guilty pleasures”, “music for people who don’t like music”… And the value of the Marcello-Morley approach to a chart placing is that it can point up the weird and subtle mirror-circle at work here. Obviously things they oughtn’t can include waxings by half-forgotten demi-stars in the twilight of their careers; performances irrevocably out of step with “their time” (whatever this means); non-ironic interpretations of quite obnoxious past-times stand-bys… But once you’re furiously mocking people for this reliance on stand-bys, this borrowed authority, well, you sometimes ruefully get to see that this is just what you’ve just been doing. The prickly stubborn defensiveness of the defeated (or the undefeated, if you prefer) seems suddenly shared, by the people who once hurried most to register how they deplored any attention paid to the second-rate. And yes, it’s a horrible corner to find yourself suddenly standing in, as fashion turns, and not everyone is well-placed to power their way back out. Certainly Squires wasn’t.

So, yes, this is just one potential guesswork deep-reading in Marcello’s 50, considered as a frozen narrative of change, of highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, loss and release, and the abrupt jags or gliding jumps between these states; considered as a conflicted field: … and of course to read it this way, to grasp the dispersed intellectual-artistic geography, you have to be patient and generous indeed with records “made the wrong way” (and by extension, with commentary “thought in the wrong way”).

Not that a context of chaotic cultural abundance is at all easy space for a career critic to operate in — having an accurate feel for a very wide range of very different types of things is a hard gig to fashion for yourself, let alone to sustain as a paying career. If we suggest that there’s a formal cultural democracy that recognises that every act or idea deserves its day in court; and — the element almost always denied almost all art — the very best, most cunning, most daring advocate available, certainly it’s always easier to get hired to denounce due process, and to deny, sight unseen, sound unheard, that insight, which is a consequence of encounter, can arise anyway. I don’t know if it’ll make MC’s fortune, but Blue is superbly attentive to the wrong-path craftsperson, broken or damaged by life (their own bad choices in act or style, or just miserable hurtling luck) — and to those fashions in techniques the world has agreed to scorn: and thus to unravelling the rhetoric that seamlessly associates micro-traditions with failure, feeling lame, in seeing ourselves as losers, as confused failures, as victims of the successful enthusiasms of others…

All of which perhaps says more about my passions than Marcello’s. And is an extremely roundabout way of saying that that this is by no means an over-familiar 50. In at least a couple of cases (Floyd’s ‘Apples and Oranges’; Blur’s ‘Popscene’), the artists themselves have attempted to consign their own contribution to oblivion. And because you have go listen as well as read, this book, as an exemplary guide to the art of criticism, is above all about opening yourself; about trusting; more exactly about catching yourself as you distrust, and recognising how pervasive and corrosive that well-nurtured kneejerk can be.

Of course, a more-or-less ironised awareness of the pre-approved quality checklists of others can certainly double-down on the punctum-as-gag: a Gallagher brother’s comments on Jay-Z at Glastonbury constitute the easiest of targets for this book’s likely readers, but this celebration of Mr Shawn Corey Carter’s version of ‘Wonderwall’, cast as rising, raging comedy dementia, recalls some of Marcello’s funniest entries on early-doors ilx… a lovely and innocent pre-lapsarian era to recall, actually.

At other times, he glides off into the delirious disconnect-reverie of images invoked by a song or a voice or a lyric — I’d describe the closing reach of the pages on Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song” as inarticulate speech of the heart, if it didn’t seem a bit of a cheek, given his self-aware rigour as a self-editor. Whatever the untweaked serendipity of an entry, this is an enormously carefully selected sequencing, and not just as an elegantly miniature entry-point to the daunting profusion of his daily output as a blogger (for some time now of course supplemented by his wife Lena; to whom this book is also a tribute and a happy mashnote). It picks a very subtly destabilising way indeed into a deep grasp of the eras he’s lived through, as broader conflicted fields more than narrow snapshots: the fading 60s as a delicately knowing revision-reconfiguration of the early Beatles (the Zombies’ ”The Way I Feel Inside’), Motown (Mari Wilson’s ‘Baby It’s True’), Stockhausen (see above) and of course Free Jazz (a track from John Stevens and Evan Parker’s The Longest Night); the 80s very slyly indeed, given how central it is to his own aesthetic and ethos, and how poorly understood it remains (of course he has a great deal more he’ll be saying about Nu-Pop soon enough, and besides, *I* have not yet spoken on this topic sternface winkyface…)

And as for the decade of his loss, his desolation, his rescue and self-rediscovery… the tale of all this last sketched very lightly indeed; largely kept private; the opposite of self-indulgence. Riding all the way from Al Bowlly, a ghost in sepia and witty crooned beige, to T.I. and Jay-Z and Kanye West and Li’l Wayne being hilarious teenage street-corner nobs-plus-ultra in ‘Swagga Like Us’, and the irreducible obnoxious life-affirming yawp of this becoming, as he himself writes, “a towering babble of voices.. where the greatest improvisers of their age take their choruses in succession, … akin to hearing Bird, Rollins, Trane and Ornette soloing, one after the other..”

Fear of music is as prevalent in modern culture — mainstream or dissident — as its simple embrace is deprecated. Avant-garde ears pour nervous scorn on any sign that we’re all more or less the same at root; that we all share feelings and failings; that under the gestures, vanguardists are contradictory mopes and dopes like the rest of us much of the time. Pop-wired ears are all too often primed to guffaw at all ambition, all risk, all departure, all experiment, scoffing at any impulse to settle anywhere but safely within the compound. Common as they are, these dismissive kinds of fears are precisely NOT the dread that haunts Carlin; not at all the unstated unease that gives this book its deep charge. Which is something more like the following: what if the wound is just too deep — not just his own wound, the immediate personal grief and shock that drove him to begin writing in public, but the wound of all the world, the social separation, the deep-embedded ever-aggravated ugliness and will to hate? What if — even if Marcello has perhaps shouldered his way through to a healing — it’s too late and too little for the rest of us?

If this is a book about discovering that love is always still possible, it’s as much a book about about learning ways to listen — delicate, uncertain, stubborn, conflicted, often as thick with resignation as curiosity — which are also ways to trust: unlearning half the anti-listening habits salted into standard lines and critical dismissals, certainly, where trust and generosity are verboten, and despised; where cynicism is endlessly confused with acuity. It’s about elements in music and listening that good critics certainly use, but very often fail to pass on — elements present in music inside and outside fashion, music facing backwards, music facing forwards, music sadly hunkering down in some soon-to-be-razed-and-developed locale, music blithely drifting through the foolish heroic amazed unawareness of new love. Elements musicians recognise in the skill of their bones, from every background and tendency, but decline to discuss, because there isn’t the language — because if there was they wouldn’t be musicians…

When you’re literally fighting for life, you can’t always be checking over your shoulder for how the people in the comfier seats are reviewing your responses: the backwash of even quite small waves of devalution may swamp; may drown. It’s an extremely difficult lesson for the professional reviewer — shrewdly surfing and evaluating broader movements, to cater to the comfortably off, materially or emotionally to internalise: that their casual column-completing quip, the observation their chums and suck-up comments crew all instantly decare “spot on”, may be the ruin or death of someone they’ve never met…

And (just to slot the dragon’s tail back in its mouth) the confidence, the trust, the gamble? Well, it begins at his own sensibility, his (I believe justified) sense of his ability to make transformative connections within musics, small and large, and to exactly express the social and personal import of any given, forgotten recording, or other music-drenched moment. Where he travels with this gift is the journey of this project. Some insist music-writing is pointless, secondary because parasitic: “dancing to architecture” the notoriously philistine phrase. Why not just let the song speak for itself? Well, here are some answers: because we do not know the song; because we do not know where any given song lives; because we fear where any given song leads, and mock at the need to leave our favoured hard-won comfort zones, radical, popular, all safe spots in-between or beyond. The author has a quiet, an almost old-fashioned delivery much of the time, but if this tricks the unwary into underestimating the scale of the daring here, nothing here can ever fully mask or efface or dodge the huge wild gamble at the book’s heart: What will all this avail him (or us)? maybe NOTHING? WHAT IF IT’S NOTHING?. Carlin has reason to mistrust the world at large: it has not always been kind to him… But his trust challenges the fear, all the fears, because it’s his gamble, in the end, on us: his readers; which is to say, the world….

Mark Sinker

Set aside what you know of his politics for a moment; and what you’ve assumed about his primary readership at this time, 1894-1910, the period of his “books for children”. Set aside too the Disney Kaa, the Disney Mowgli, the the Disney jungle. Almost casually, in the sense that it wasn’t particularly his life’s main project, Kipling established a type of modern cinematic body-horror that’s all the more startling for being so offhand. This nightmarishly exciting scene, of the teenage wolfboy running across the Bee Rocks, to lure the dhole, the marauding Dekkan Red Dog pack, into a fatal trap as the bees wake in vast swarming numbers, and go to war — the dhole who survive bees and river being ruthlessly mopped up by Akela’s wolves downstream — was my favourite Mowgli story as a child, I think simply because it’s so sustainedly descriptively intense and vividly grisly; the sense of the ground itself clouding volcanically up into aggressive life; that terrible image of the falling “things”, dogs become lumps of pure bee. And, you know, just the idea of MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF UNTAMED BEES!

This particular anecdote, set near the Strand, is from 1889 or just after, when RK was just 23 and already pretty famous — and it reminds you, more than a bit startlingly, that he arrived in a Victorian London bookended, as it were, by Jack the Ripper and Oscar Wilde. However dated Kipling seems to us (and he was already considered a fossil in the 1930s), he was an amazing modernist monster to his contemporaries, a child prodigy bringing news of a potently unsettling world — the colonies before him being little more than occasional exotic noises off now and then, in literary terms — and riding the waves this news made until the Great War, when everything he believed in went smash.

Anyway, the shock of potential recognition here — by the middle of the story’s third sentence, and the phrase “of Burgos” — is that it was Kipling’s short tale that inspired Eco’s much longer one. And the somewhat unsettling realisation, just 20 pages later, is that Kipling really had anticipated most of the subtext and deep subject of the successor work, in his compact, allusive way: both are about optics, science and medicine, the relationship of faith, the church, reading, writing and libraries to wisdom and knowledge, their propagation and their suppression; and the society of senior monks at work, and relaxing socially afterwards; about where the rules lie and what may happen when you challenge them. Both have a point to make, Kipling’s the more layered in ironies intended and unexpected…