Saturday, June 15, 2002

Rereading / One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis



That uncertain feeling


David Lodge on the prophetic self-portrait Kingsley Amis created in his least likeable novel, One Fat Englishman
One Fat Englishman 
Kingsley Amis Gollancz
1963

David Lodge
Saturday 15 June 2002

In 1963 I published one of the earliest articles about the novels of Kingsley Amis to appear in an academic journal. In it I discussed his first four novels, from Lucky Jim to Take A Girl Like You, but not One Fat Englishman, which came out in the same year. Nor, when I later reprinted my essay in a book, did I extend it to include consideration of that novel.
The reason for this silence was that I didn't quite know what to make of One Fat Englishman, and it certainly didn't fit the general drift of my argument. I hadn't really enjoyed reading it, and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis's earlier fiction. Those books, I wrote, "speak to me in an idiom, a tone of voice, to which I respond with immediate understanding and pleasure".
Lucky Jim and its successors had that effect on many readers of my generation, who came of age in the 1950s, especially those from lower-middle-class backgrounds who found themselves promoted into the professions by educational opportunity, but remained uneasy with, and critical of, the attitudes and values of the social and cultural Establishment.
The heroes of those novels were quick to identify and satirically subvert any hint of pretension, affectation, snobbery, vanity and hypocrisy in public and private life. What they stood for is most simply described as "decency", and when they didn't live up to their own code, they felt appropriate remorse.
The least ethical of these heroes, Patrick Standish in Take A Girl Like You, is balanced by the transparently decent heroine, Jenny Bunn, whose point of view complements his. Roger Micheldene, the corpulent British publisher whose adventures on a brief business trip to America are chronicled in One Fat Englishman, is a very different character. He is rude, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and totally selfish.

While trying to revive an affair with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he grabs every opportunity to copulate with other available women. His mind and often his speech are crammed with offensive observations about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals and Americans in general. He eats like a pig and drinks like a fish.
The story punishes Roger for his sins by submitting him to a series of farcical humiliations, and eventually he is sent home with his tail between his legs. But he is the hero, or anti-hero, of the novel, whose consciousness totally dominates it and with whom the authorial voice is rhetorically in collusion: that is to say, his obnoxious opinions and responses are articulated through the same distinctive stylistic devices that were associated with the earlier and more amiable Amis heroes.

The reader may guiltily catch himself sniggering at lines like: "At this evasion a part of Roger wanted to step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops" or "a girl of Oriental appearance who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye sockets as well as eyes".
In 1963, knowing nothing about Amis except through his writings, I was puzzled to know why he had taken such pains to create this vividly unpleasant character. In my memory, most reviewers were equally baffled and disappointed. Recently I picked up a second-hand copy of the first edition of One Fat Englishman, which prompted me to reread it. In the light of Amis's subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, it seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel - also much funnier, in its black way, than I remembered.
It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene was in many respects a devastating and prophetic self-portrait. The character's promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources. For the novel's American setting, Amis would have been drawing on his experience as a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 1958-9, when, he informed Philip Larkin in a letter on his return: "I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time - On the second count I was at it practically full-time - you have to take what you can get when you can get it, you sam [sic]."
Amis's casual infidelities were a constant source of friction between him and his wife Hilly, but in 1962, when he would have been working on One Fat Englishman, he fell seriously in love with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom he met that autumn at the Cheltenham Literary Festival (appropriately enough as co-members of a forum on sex in literature); he commenced a passionate affair with her.
Shortly after Hilly discovered this, she accompanied Kingsley on a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia, and when he fell asleep on the beach one day, she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: "1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING". (A photograph of this vengeful graffito is reproduced in Eric Jacobs's biography.) Before the novel was published, the marriage had ended.

Although Kingsley was not really fat at this time, he became so in due course, and as gluttonous as Roger Micheldene. But whereas for Roger this was an appetite that competed for priority with the sexual (at one point, having picked up a girl at a bring-your-own-picnic, he worries about "the problem of retaining contact with Suzanne without giving her anything to eat"), with Kingsley, according to his son Martin in his memoir Experience, "getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980 - a complex symptom, repressive, self-isolating. It cancelled him out sexually."
One Fat Englishman was written on the cusp of Amis's ideological transformation, almost exactly halfway between the Fabian pamphlet of 1957 in which he declared his allegiance to the Labour party, and the 1967 essay, Why Lucky Jim Turned Right, which announced his conversion to conservatism. As time went on, he became more and more notorious for his politically incorrect opinions on education, war, women, and race, and domestically he enjoyed winding Martin up in this way. Many of his prejudices were anticipated by Roger Micheldene, but in the novel they have an ambivalent import because of the implied moral of the tale.
It is as if Kingsley Amis, conscious in the early 1960s of the way his values and opinions were changing, and, half-appalled himself at the process, projected them into a fictional character he could simultaneously identify with and condemn. In a curious and interesting way Roger himself is similarly divided. "Why are you so awful?" Helene asks him at a moment of post-coital candour. "Yes, I used to ask myself that quite a lot," he replies. "Not so much of late however." She finds this honesty disarming, which is exactly the effect he calculated, but it is not "just" calculation. Roger is really full of self-hatred - it is the source of the vitriolic anger he directs at almost everything and everybody in the world around him and it is hard to disagree with the judgment of the American priest, Father Colgate, absurd figure though he is: "You are in acute spiritual pain."
We take leave of Roger weeping tears he is unable to explain as his ship slides out of New York harbour, and resolving to lift his mood by surveying the shipboard totty. "Something in him was less than enthusiastic about this course of action but he resolved to ignore it. Better a bastard than a bloody fool."
Father Colgate would call that maxim "obstinacy in sin", while Jim Dixon would have turned it the other way round. One Fat Englishman is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought.
· David Lodge's most recent novel is Thinks... published by Penguin

THE GUARDIAN



2002

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Saturday, June 8, 2002

Rereading / Jane Austen / Emma´s pride

Jane Austen

Emma's pride

AC Grayling on Jane Austen's pre-Freudian analysis of humanity and folly

Emma
Jane Austen
First published by John Murray, 1816

Saturday 8 June 2002 00.06 BST

Jane Austen painted a large universe on her "two square inches of ivory". In the narrow round of life as lived by country gentry in late Georgian times, in the interesting but even narrower margin of that epoch in young ladies' lives when they are looking about them for a husband, she found and anatomised fundamental features of human sense, pride, prejudice and sensibility.
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Monday, May 27, 2002

Edna O´Brien / The Danger Zone

Edna O'Brien


The Danger Zone


EDNA O'BRIEN
26 May 2002

Each year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters invites a distinguished speaker to deliver the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address, on some aspect of arts and letters. This year, on May 15th, Edna O’Brien gave the Blashfield Address. O’Brien is the author of fifteen novels and five collections of short stories. She is a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy and a native of Ireland, where some of her books have been banned because of their sexual candor. O’Brien has published more than forty works of fiction in The New Yorker, the first in 1962, and the most recent this year. Her latest novel, “In the Forest,” has been described as an “unholy myth” and “a tour de force of finely restrained fury.”

Edna O’brien: Hello. Yes, I’m told it’s a great privilege to do this lecture. I won’t speak of the pleasure factor, because, well, you can tell why—Ian McKellen gave me advice about the microphone, which I’ve forgotten, something about the necessary degree of separation between me and it.

Down the years, the written word has incurred crucifixion, beheading, stoning, castration, burnings, outrage, vehemence, intemperance, and a bigotry that veers from the righteous to the superstitious. To take two tiny examples: Theodore Roosevelt described Tolstoy as “a sexual and moral pervert.” Subsequently, the Postmaster General prevented copies of “The Kreutzer Sonata” from being distributed, lest it imperil the morals of America. Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, who had liquidated millions, believed, in the occasional Faustian moment, that Mandelstam possessed the magical powers of a shaman. My own mother sustained such a revulsion for the written word it was as if she had read Molly Bloom in a secret incarnation and had to do atonement for it. Her constant adage to me, which is certainly open to interpretation, was “That paper never refused ink.”

Writers have been in the trenches from time beginning. Euripides, to my mind the greatest of the Greek dramatists, was driven out of Athens around 409 B.C., his crime being his unflinching depiction of the evil inherent in both God and man. Cutting across the orchestrated glorification of power and plunder, he wrote of the monumental folly of the Trojan War, supposedly fought over a bedizened, sensuous, and totally guiltless Helen of Troy. He fled to Macedonia and was devoured by the king’s hunting dogs, which is how he died. Danger comes in many guises—political, religious, sexual, psychological, and linguistic. The stymieing of thought and of ideas has always had precedence in every epoch. Followers of Confucius were burnt alive, the emperor Tiberius had those who criticized him starved to death and then crucified. The English crown, with a nicety inconsistent with much else of its conquest and rapine, solved it completely by forbidding printing except by royal license, thus creating an ethos of precensorship, which continued until 1695. Sexual censorship found its flowering, its glorious patronage, in the person of Queen Victoria and her vassals, who commenced the drive for the purification of literature. They might just have foreseen the advent and birth of the Jesuitical James Joyce, born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, a city that he left forever in his early twenties, disavowing Mother Church and Mother Ireland. Joyce, smarting under early rejections, wished that his work would glean the same wrath as Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” in short, to be so scandalous as to incur a public trial. His prayer was duly answered.

In Rome, he worked as a banker, and so impecunious was he that he had to receive his customers sitting down, because the seat of his trousers was torn. It was there that he first conceived of “Ulysses,” an epic in which, as he told his brother, he would put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department and draw up as well the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith, leader of Sinn Féin, Ibsen, St. Aloysius, Shelley, Renan—in short, the bodily fervor that runs amok in one and all. He was searching, as he put it, for fermented ink to whet his rage, in the same way as absinthe sizzled his young brain. He began “Ulysses” in Trieste in 1915, and, with the help of Ezra Pound, chapters began to appear in magazines, including The Little Review, here in New York. The two editors, Miss Heap and Miss Anderson, said they were moved, utterly, by the piercing spirit of Joyce’s words. Well, the piercing spirit turned traitor. Doubts began to simmer. And even Miss Harriet Weaver, his patron, had her misgivings. Whereas Emma Bovary’s longings were beautiful, lofty, and transporting, Joyce dismantled the human body, male and female, with the prodigality of a poet, the smut of a pornographer, and the objectivity of a mortician. When an episode from “Nausicaa,” of “Ulysses,” appeared in The Little Review, all issues were confiscated and burnt. A Mr. John Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had lodged a formal complaint, and Miss Anderson, the benighted editor, was summoned to a court in Greenwich Village before three judges, some doyens of culture, and intrigued New Yorkers. The chapter centers on Gerty MacDowell, a model of Catholic girlhood, who has gone to the seaside for a bit of relaxation. She who crimsoned at rude words finds herself yielding to the lascivious glances of a mysterious stranger, none other than Leopold Bloom. And while she swings her legs in and out and watches some fireworks, she gives the gentleman a good view of her nainsook knickers, imagines him to be in deep mourning, missing perhaps a wife, while Bloom, on the point of emission, reverts to his old drollery, at it again. Joyce was in no doubt about the flagrancy of this chapter. He described it as namby-pamby, jammy, marmeladey, drawersy style, with the effects of incense, Mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, chitchat, and circumlocutions. So, as the offending passages were about to be read out in the court, one of the judges asked if Miss Anderson could be removed as an act of propriety, forgetting that she must have read it, being the editor. The other two judges found it so incomprehensible they had to have a week’s leave to collect their faculties. At the summing-up, the prosecuting attorney became so apoplectic that John Quinn, advocate and lawyer, pointed out as clear evidence that “Ulysses” did not corrupt or fill people with sexual urges as did the mannequins in the windows of Fifth Avenue that it made people implode with anger. The ploy didn’t work. The editors were fined, fifty dollars each, and forbidden to publish any more installments of “Ulysses.” The book itself did not reach this country for thirteen years.

Now we move on to May, 1957. A police officer—no, two police officers—in San Francisco went into the City Lights bookshop and, for seventy-five cents, purchased a copy of “Howl and Other Poems,” by Allen Ginsberg. They then obtained a warrant for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s arrest, who was charged with violation of Section 311, for willfully and lewdly selling the book. That trial, too, had its moments of hilarity. One phrase that Joyce would surely have appropriated was “Seek filth, and ye shall find it.” At issue was whether “Howl,” with its discolored words and hallucinatory thinking, excited prurient interest. Allen Ginsberg’s odyssey of subways, Benzedrine, spilt brains, bare buttocks, and easy lays proved grist to the mill of its defenders, who argued that this nightmare world reflected this author’s rage and loneliness, and was figurative of America itself on the verge of breakdown. The judge, the Honorable Clayton W. Horn—Joyce would have also relished that—quoted Thomas Jefferson and concluded that the poem did not present a danger to society, and even had some redeeming social importance. Thomas Pynchon wrote, some years later, that the effect of that group of writers, which included Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, O’Hara, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, was exciting and liberating, and strangely positive. And it was. But I find their work audacious rather than dangerous. They were self-created Buddhas who spat forth their mantras, Ginsberg himself praising writing for its improvisation, far-outness, and bop. In their self-absorption, their vagabond existences, and their glorification of opiate-induced works, they conferred on themselves a prestige, an exoticness, and were lucky to live in a society that itself was bursting out of puritan bondage. But real danger, in any art, is usually born in solitary. Samuel Beckett writing of Jack Yeats once said, “The artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere, has no kith.” The twentieth century has a long, salutary, shocking catalogue of brotherless, sisterless writers, men and women who for an integrity of word and thought have been incarcerated, silenced, or never even heard of at all.

Mandelstam put it this way. He said, “There are two kinds of world literature, that with permission and that without permission.” The first he depicted as functionaries who from a state of animal fear tap out the given, the appropriate, the predictable, and the accepted. The second were those who, as he said, “took language as if it was stolen air.” I want to read part of the poem that caused his downfall.

“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, / Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard, / And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue, / Then they remember the Kremlin mountaineer. / His fat fingers are slimy like slugs, / And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights. / His cockroach whiskers are laughing, / And his boot tops shine. / . . . Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes, / One in the groin for him, and the forehead for him, for him one over the eyes, one in the eyes for him. / When he has an execution it’s a special treat, / And the Ossetian chest swells.”

The story is well known. Mandelstam recited his epigram, as he called it, to a small group of friends, and it was reported within days. Secret police in topcoats arrived in his Moscow apartment, ransacking, questioning, confiscating everything, before arresting him for sabotage against the state. He was even invited to recall poems that might have led to his arrest. So he mentioned a few, “The Wolf,” “Old Crimea,” and then he was ordered to recite the Stalin poem, which he spoke a truncated version of. But his captors knew the real thing. He and his wife were ordered to pack their few belongings and exiled to a town in the Ural Mountains. Akhmatova, who was present, handed him a boiled egg, and foresaw his fate as the banished poet, the betrayed one. Their sentence was commuted to an exile in Voronezh, in southern Russia. Life was bleak, fearful, isolated, and totally impoverished. He even asked one of his captors if perhaps he could get a job as a night watchman, begging, as he said, “alms from a shadow.” He was driven to suicide, but one jump and he was back in his mind again. Police and informers dropped in at any hour, seizing whatever poems had been written, Mandelstam snatching them back, a fistfight ensuing, great poems torn up, and Mandelstam pleading with his wife, Nadezhda, to remember what he had written, she his living lexicon. This is a fragment written during that incarceration: “These hundred carat ingots, Rome nights, / Those breasts that for young Goethe were a lure, / Let me be answerable, but not lose all of my rights, / Life still exists outside the law.” We have to ask the question—what harm lurks in those beautiful, tender lines. None. None whatsoever, only in the poisoned megalomaniacal minds of tyrants and their cohorts.

Let it not be forgotten or ignored that these barbarities existed in other dictatorships. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the “blue-eyed giant,” as he was called, had his works banned in Turkey for his Communist leanings. And it seems that some military cadets were found reading these banned poems, and he was imprisoned for thirteen years. This is a fragment of one poem: “I love my country . . . I’ve swung on her plane trees, been inside her prisons. / Nothing dispells my depression / Like her songs and tobacco.” The marvel is that such lyricism, such wonder, such luminous recollections could be sustained in a barred dungeon, subscribing, I suppose, to Borges’s claim of writing being “a vague, unreasonable, but ancient quest.”

Being only human, poor Mandelstam tried ways of ingratiating himself with the authorities, and he even worked on a long ode to Stalin—long, complex, dilatory, but unable to cross the crooked chasm into adulation. His mouth, as he feared, would be twisted by lies. When, in 1937, their sentence had expired, and they were allowed back to Moscow, they believed their servitude over. They were even treated to a stay in a sanatorium. But, in one of those ghastly reversals of fate that only Kafka could have written of, the cure was cut short. More uniformed men arrived one morning, and he was arrested, dispatched to a labor camp in eastern Siberia, where he was processed as a counter-revolutionary. Stories abound of his dementia, his refusing food, his scavenging in dustbins at night. But none, none tell precisely the hour, the place, or the cause of Mandelstam’s death. His wife learned of it on account of a food parcel being returned by the post office. It was sometime in December, 1938.

And what about now. What about now. What themes do writers choose. What barriers, what mountains of untruth and misinformation, what universes of torture and terror are there to be challenged. It is a vastly different world, at once freer, zanier, and more uncomprehendingly terrifying. The serious reportage that is being done at the moment in this country and in other countries is trailblazing; men and women at the cliff face, at the war fronts, at the sieged cities, the defiled manger, dispatching bulletins at once real and visionary, everyday Armageddons. Two of the most remarkable things I read this year were by journalists. One was Dexter Filkins, in the New York Times, describing Taliban prisoners in a truck from Kunduz. A Biblical tableau of captives, rags, and filth, flies swarming around them, bodies contorted, fighting for tiny corners of space and begging for only one thing, water. They gestured to the guards, their hands going up and down toward their mouths as dipping into a well. And what did their Northern Alliance tormentor do? He gave them a meagre amount, just enough to add to their thirst. The second was a searing essay in The New Yorker, by Jeffrey Goldberg, on the plight of Kurds in northern Iraq—precise, distilled of emotion, but with a haunting resonance. This is how he tells it: A woman is taken prisoner into a big room with over two thousand people. Women, children, all starving. One pipe spitting out brackish water. As people begin to die, the Iraqi guards outside demand the bodies be passed through the window. The woman’s six-year-old son fell ill and died, and soon after his body is handed out. Soon after that, again she looked, she looked and saw the legs and hands of her own son in the mouths of the dogs in the yard. And at that moment she lost her mind.

“Fuck you, America, with your atom bomb,” was how Allen Ginsberg put it, little knowing how the arsenal would spawn and propagate into unthinkable, unknowable proportions, vast enough to undo creation. We know the potent sounding names, Trident, Cobra, Apache, and the chirpy one, like Daisy Cutter, meant, no doubt, to infuse us with a comfortable semi-amnesiac feeling of safety. In silos, in submarines, in nocturnal repose, the beast, the nuclear beasts, the golems, waiting to be triggered into life, to be given purpose, to be given soul. We cannot write about these things because technology has jettisoned our imagination, and therefore cauterized language. Then, there are the leaders themselves—East, Middle East, West—insatiate, capricious, monomaniacal, self-deluding in their lethal cocoons, gods of a sort, each with a franchise, to be the god. But they are mortal, too. And it is our duty to remind them of that, to hammer it home. Writing, whether it be poetry, drama, literature, reportage, is more essential, more important, and more reverberatory than ever. It is a touchstone, a transparent trace of man’s potential humanity and ongoingness.

I read years ago a remark by Romain Rolland, which has stayed with me. He said, “Art is a great consolation to the individual but it is useless against history.” However, since everyone here today, and hopefully many others, are on the consolation quest, both as hostages to and witnesses of history, it is not the time to be pusillanimous or silenced by our helplessness.

I would like to end with Lear’s rousing summons to Cordelia, regardless of their fallen state. “So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, / Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out; / And take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out, / In a wall’d prison, packs and sets of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon.”

I thank you for your forbearance, and for everything. ♦

THE NEW YORKER


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Sunday, May 12, 2002

Fay Weldon / This much I know / There's a time and a place for everything

Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon

This much I know

There's a time and a place for everything 

Fay Weldon, 70, writer, on the lessons she has learnt in life

Jonathan Heawood
Sunday 12 May 2002 01.57 BST

There's a time and a place for everything - even incest and morris dancing - in fiction.
Therapists say you should learn to live independently after a break-up: not rush into another relationship. Are they mad? Turn your back on God's gift and it may never come again.
Children will call their teacher a fascist because he makes them do things they don't want to, and Hitler called himself a socialist. I'd always prefer a funny fascist to a serious socialist.
When I arrived in London I saw the city as a challenge. I think I've won.
In autobiography you put a kind of shape on to the life. In the first half you set all the questions, and in the second half you answer them.

Which came first, chicken or egg? The egg. You can't go to work on a chicken. Of course I didn't write Go To Work On An Egg. But it's a long and boring story and no one has the patience for it - not even me.
Yesterday's boys are today's girls, guarding their sensibilities and their virtue against predatory attack, demanding commitment, affection and babies.
True creative freedom is these days reserved for children's authors, their editors silenced and their marketing departments struck dumb by the unexpected success of Harry Potter .
The media wears you out, there's so much of it. But it's our only protection against government.
People long for literature to be pure and writers to live in garrets, but someone has to do it, someone has to be morally responsible for society, and the bishops are a bit flaky these days.
Yesterday's truth is today's lie. Ibsen gave the process 20 years and he was right. Feminism started as a revolution, succeeded, and turned into an orthodoxy.
I once killed two friends of the family by putting them in a swimming pool with a diving board but no way out. I could get addicted to playing The Sims, although the game is limited by the imagination of its creators. They have a suburban idea of luxury.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a short story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.
Nothing stops me writing except flu.
A little recognition always goes a long way. Getting my CBE was like a school prizegiving. We stood in a queue with the other great and good, and we chatted a lot and were asked to be quiet by the footmen. (It is possible for the great and the good to become extremely noisy.) The Queen said: 'I believe you write television plays,' and I said: 'I write anything I'm asked, Ma'am.' I have been a royalist ever since.
Women always feel the need to apologise for the weather, as if it was their fault.
I write in short paragraphs because when I began there were always children around, and it was the most I could do to get three lines out between crises.
Learn to write with a computer. I've only recently begun to use a keyboard. It happened because I read one of my own stories in an anthology of mostly American writers, and my handwritten piece seemed gnarled and twisted compared to the easy flow of the other writers who I realised all used computers. So I decided gnarled and twisted was not the path of the future. I've yet to see if it makes much difference to my style.
I would write another sponsored novel [like The Bulgari Connection] if the opportunity came and I could do it with a degree of integrity. A young male Belgian writer has just finished a book sponsored by Harley-Davidson and is getting rave reviews, so it can be done, but not often. Companies have to choose their writer very carefully.
The only historical figure I identify with is Patient Grisel in The Canterbury Tales - a forlorn and self-pitying figure who came to a bad end.
I crave nothing but constant love and attention.



THIS MUCH I KNOW



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Saturday, May 11, 2002

Life and style / Kathryn Williams / I look like a fish when I sing


LIFE AND STYLE
Q&A
Kathryn Williams
Singer

 "I look like a fish when I sing"
Rosanna Greenstreet

Saturday 11 May 2002 01.59 BST

Kathryn Williams was born in 1974. Her father was a folk singer in the 1960s. After doing an art degree she, too, began songwriting and performing. In 1998, she set up Caw Records, and released a mini album, Toocan. The following year, her Dog Leap Stairs album won critical acclaim, and, in 2000, Little Black Numbers gained her a Mercury Music Prize nomination. She is married, and lives in Newcastle.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Happiness isn't a continuous state: it happens in small amounts of time, and that's what keeps me going.
What is your greatest fear?
That people who love me don't love me any more.
Which living person do you most admire?
Bob Dylan as a writer, but he might be a bad person, so Arundhati Roy, who has stopped doing what she does so well to do something she believes in.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience. Next question please.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Arrogance, two faced-ness, vanity.
What vehicles do you own?
A car.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I look like a fish when I sing.

Where would you like to live?
Somewhere with a garden.
What is your favourite smell?
Water boiling on a cooker (it reminds me of my gran's house).
What is your favourite fantasy?
A quiet life.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Conventional beauty.
Have you ever said 'I love you' and not meant it?
A man took me to Paris, and I came back engaged, just to be polite.
What is your greatest regret?
My gran never seeing me sing.
When and where were you happiest?
Every Saturday breakfast, reading papers, radio, Neil and the cats.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
A garden or a private jet.
What keeps you awake at night?
My cat standing on my chest.
How would you like to die?
Without knowing.
Do you believe in life after death?
Only when thinking about people who aren't here any more.
How would you like to be remembered?
With affection.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
TV will survive you.



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Sunday, May 5, 2002

Peter Ustinov / This much I know / Children are close to the mystery of birth and old people are close to the mystery of death

Peter Ustinov

Peter Ustinov
(1921 - 2004)

This much I know


Children are close to the mystery of birth 
and old people are close to the mystery of death

Sir Peter Ustinov, 81, actor and writer, Vaud, Switzerland

Geraldine Bedell
Sunday 5 May 2002 00.47 BST

Being an exile is a huge advantage, if you handle it properly.

I have few regrets. But once, when I was making a film in Israel, I was collecting my breakfast from a buffet when I saw Ariel Sharon coming in the other direction with his tray. I stood back elegantly to let him past, and he went on like an express train. I have always regretted I didn't stick my foot out and send him and his breakfast sprawling.
Immediately I'm interested in something, I feel 10 years younger.
I only found out after my father died how consistently he had been unfaithful. He even stole a girlfriend of mine.
Children are close to the mystery of birth and old people are close to the mystery of death. Those in between are involved with the moment, so that their horizons are much nearer.
Comedy is tragedy that has gone wrong. It's one way of being serious.
When the little boys at my prep school in London wished to be unpleasant, they accused me of losing the First World War because my father was German. When they realised they'd gone too far, they claimed the German trenches had been much more sanitary than the French. But my mother was French, so it didn't really help.
An optimist is someone who realises how grim things are and resolves to try anyway; a pessimist is someone who finds it out anew every morning.
My half-Ethiopian grandmother would tell me the story of the crucifixion when I was a child on her knee. She would describe it as if she had been there, crying so copiously that the top of my pyjamas became wet with her tears and very cold. I've been suspicious of the Bible ever since.

Politicians are like milk that has been forced to float above cream.
I suspect if I'd married my third wife first I only would have been married once. But you can't tell.
Children are born completely without prejudice. So it shows that the basic material is very good.
Technology is developing so fast that the human mind is not ready to take it in. And just as in the 15th century, when explorers were discovering new lands, we are in desperate need of cartographers to make sense of it.
Russia is a country in which 60-year-olds are queueing to play Hamlet, but can't because some 80-year-old is still doing it. So if you're Russian you just carry on working.
Human beings can walk on the moon, but can't make successful airport baggage trolleys.
I tried to keep my second marriage going for so long because of the children. When it broke up, the children said to me, 'Why did you wait so long?'
Why was I always so aggressive about Mrs Thatcher? It's simple: I am a feminist and she isn't.
Education ends with death. Or after, according to your beliefs.

My father wanted me to be a lawyer. I told him I would be an actor, because it's really the same profession but less dangerous to our fellow men.
The only form of patriotism I can really stand is a feeling for the sap in your veins. I can't bear patriotism at anyone else's expense.
Tennis umpires have a code of conduct that makes no concessions to anything other than the stiff upper lip. Why shouldn't a man break his racket if he wants? It's his racket.
How do actors learn their lines? I've played King Lear twice, at four-and-a-half hours a time, and I still don't know.
At school we were asked to name a Russian composer on a general-knowledge paper. The answer was Tchaikovsky, because we had been studying him. I put Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and I was upbraided in front of the whole school for showing off.
The English believe the Germans don't have a sense of humour. But they do; it's just more intellectual.
There was a picture up in my first school of Jesus Christ pointing out the extent of the British Empire. No one would dream of putting up such a picture today, so it shows there is progress.
What would I like on my tombstone? Keep off the grass.


THIS MUCH I KNOW

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