Wednesday, December 3, 2003

A Fire in the Brain / The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter




BOOKS

A FIRE IN THE BRAIN

The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter.

BY DECEMBER 8, 2003




William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People would come up to him and ask him if he was all right. Once, his young daughter, Anne, boarded a bus and found him in that condition among the passengers. She knew better than to disturb him. But when the bus stopped at their gate, she got off with him. He turned to her vaguely and said, “Oh, who is it you wish to see?”
When I think of what it means to be an artist’s child, I remember that story. There are worse fates. But in the artist’s household the shifts that the children must endure—they can’t make noise (he’s working), they can’t leave on vacation (he hasn’t finished the chapter)—are combined with a mystique that this is all for some exalted cause, which they must honor even though they are too young to understand it. Furthermore, if the artist is someone of Yeats’s calibre, the children, as they develop, will measure themselves against him and come up short. In fact, many artists’ children turn out just fine, and grow up to edit their parents’ work and live off the royalties. But some do not—for example, James Joyce’s two children. His son became an alcoholic; his daughter went mad. Carol Loeb Shloss, a Joyce scholar who teaches at Stanford, has just written a book about the latter: “Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30).


Lucia grew up in a disorderly household. Joyce had turned his back on Ireland in 1904, when he was twenty-two. Convinced that he was a genius but that his countrymen would never recognize this, he persuaded Nora Barnacle, his wife-to-be, to sail with him to the Continent. They eventually landed in Trieste, and there, for the next decade or so, he worked as a language teacher and completed “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” With the publication of “Portrait,” in 1916, he acquired rich patrons, but until then—that is, throughout his children’s early years—the Joyces were very poor. Some days they went without dinner. Their first child, Giorgio, was born in 1905, a bonny, easy baby, and, furthermore, a boy. Nora adored him till the day she died. Two years after Giorgio came Lucia, a sickly, difficult child, and a girl, with strabismus. (That is, she was cross-eyed. Nora, too, had strabismus, but hers was far less noticeable.) Lucia’s earliest memories of her mother were of scoldings. Joyce, on the other hand, loved Lucia, spoiled her, sang to her, but only when he had time. He worked all day and then, on many nights, he went out and got blind drunk. The family was evicted from apartment after apartment. By the age of seven, Lucia had lived at five different addresses. By thirteen, she had lived in three different countries. The First World War forced the Joyces to move to Zurich; after the war, they settled in Paris. As a result, Lucia received a spotty education, during which she was repeatedly left back by reason of having to learn a new language.
Was she strange from childhood? With people who become mentally ill as adults, this question is always hard to answer, because most witnesses, knowing what happened later, read it back into the early years, and are sure that the signs were already there. Richard Ellmann, the author of the standard biography of Joyce, and Brenda Maddox, in her “Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce,” both note that the young Lucia seemed to stare off into space, but the strabismus might account for this. It is also said that she was reticent socially. Although she was talkative at home—a “saucebox,” her father called her—she apparently went through periods when she spoke to few people outside her family. But the language-switching could explain this. A friend of the family described her, in her twenties, as “illiterate in three languages.” It was four, actually: German, French, English, and Triestine Italian. The last was her native tongue, the language that her family used at home, not just in Trieste but forever after (because Joyce found it easier on the voice). It was not, however, what people spoke in most of the places where she lived.
When Lucia was fifteen, she began taking dance lessons, mostly of the new, anti-balletic, “aesthetic” variety, and this became her main interest during her teens and early twenties. She started at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris, then moved on to study with the toga-clad Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s older brother. Eventually, she hooked up with a commune of young women who performed now and then, in Paris and elsewhere, as Les Six de Rythme et Couleur. However briefly, Lucia was a professional dancer. She is said to have excelled in sauvage roles. But eventually she left this group, as she left every group. (I count nine dance schools in seven years.) In part, that may have been due to lack of encouragement from her family. Nora reportedly nagged Lucia to give up dancing. According to members of the family, she was jealous of the attention the girl received. As for Joyce, Brenda Maddox says he felt “it was unseemly for women to get on the stage and wave their arms about.”
Finally, after seven years’ training in the left wing of dance, Lucia bolted to the right wing, and embarked on a backbreaking course of ballet instruction with Lubov Egorova, formerly of the Maryinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg. This was a terrible idea. Professional ballet dancers begin their training at around the age of eight. Lucia was twenty-two. She worked six hours a day, but of course she couldn’t catch up, and, in her discouragement, she concluded that she was not physically strong enough to be a dancer of any kind—a decision, Joyce wrote to a friend, that cost her “a month’s tears.”
The loss of her dance career was not the only grief that Lucia suffered in her early twenties. The publication of “Ulysses,” in 1922, made Joyce a star, and there were plenty of young artistic types in Paris who thought it would be nice to be attached to his family. When Giorgio was in his late teens, an American heiress, Helen Fleischman, laid claim to him; eventually he moved in with her. Lucia, who had been very close to Giorgio, felt abandoned. She was also scandalized. (Fleischman was eleven years older than Giorgio, and married.) Finally, she wondered what she was missing. She decided to find out, and in the space of about two years she was rejected by three men: her father’s assistant, Samuel Beckett, who told her he wasn’t interested in her in that way; her drawing teacher, Alexander Calder, who bedded her but soon went back to his fiancée; and another artist, Albert Hubbell, who had an affair with her and then went back to his wife. Lucia became more experimental. She took to meeting a sailor at the Eiffel Tower. She announced that she was a lesbian. During these romantic travails, she became more distressed over her strabismus. She had the eye operated on, but it didn’t change. Soon afterward, her pride received another blow: her parents told her that they were going to get married. (Giorgio’s marriage to the newly divorced Fleischman got them thinking about legality and inheritance.) This is how she discovered that they never had been married and that she was a bastard.
The following year, on Joyce’s fiftieth birthday, Lucia picked up a chair and threw it at her mother, whereupon Giorgio took her to a medical clinic and checked her in. “He thereby changed her fate,” Shloss writes. That is a strong judgment, but it is true in part, because the minute an emotionally disturbed person is placed in an institution the story enters a new phase, in which we see not just the original problem but its alterations under institutionalization: the effects of drugs, the humiliation of being locked up and supervised, the consequent change in the person’s self-image and in other people’s image of him or her. For the next three years, Lucia went back and forth between home and hospital. One night in 1933, she was at home when the news came that a United States District Court had declared “Ulysses” not obscene (which meant that it could be published in the States). The Joyces’ phone rang and rang with congratulatory calls. Lucia cut the phone wires—“Im the artist,” she said—and when they were repaired she cut them again. As her behavior grew worse, her hospitalizations became longer. She went from French clinics to Swiss sanitariums. She was analyzed by Jung. (Briefly—she wanted no part of him.) One doctor said she was “hebephrenic,” which at that time was a subtype of schizophrenia, describing patients who showed antic, “naughty” behavior. Another diagnostician said she was “not lunatic but markedly neurotic.” A third thought the problem was “cyclothymia,” akin to manic-depressive illness. At one point in 1935, when she seemed stabler, her parents let her go visit some cousins in Bray, a seaside town near Dublin. There she set a peat fire in the living room, and when her cousins’ boyfriends came to call she tried to unbutton their trousers. She also, night after night, turned on the gas tap, in a sort of suicidal game. Then she disappeared to Dublin, where she tramped the streets for six days, sleeping in doorways, or worse. When she was found, she herself asked to be taken to a nursing home.
Soon afterward, the Joyces put her in an asylum in Ivry, outside Paris. She was twenty-eight, and she never lived on the outside again. She changed hospitals a few times, but her condition remained the same. She was quiet for the most part, though periodically she would go into a tearing rage—breaking windows, attacking people—and then she would be put in a straitjacket until she calmed down. This went on for forty-seven years, until her death, in 1982, at the age of seventy-five.
Carol Shloss believes that Lucia’s case was cruelly mishandled. When Lucia fell ill, she at last captured her father’s sustained attention. He grieved over her incessantly. At the same time, he was in the middle of writing “Finnegans Wake,” and there were people around him—friends, patrons, assistants, on whom, since he was going blind, he was very dependent—who believed that the future of Western literature depended on his ability to finish this book. But he was not finishing it, because he was too busy worrying about Lucia. He was desperate to keep her at home. His friends—and also Nora, who bore the burden of caring for Lucia when she was at home, and who was the primary target of her fury—insisted that she be institutionalized. The entourage finally prevailed, and Joyce completed “Finnegans Wake.” In Shloss’s view, Lucia was the price paid for a book.
But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce’s death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia’s letters, together with Joyce’s letters to and about her. Shloss says that Giorgio’s son, Stephen Joyce, actually removed letters from a public collection in the National Library of Ireland. When Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora was in galleys, Maddox was required to delete her epilogue on Lucia in return for permission to quote various Joyce materials. Shloss doesn’t waste any tears over Maddox, however. In her opinion, Maddox and Ellmann are among the sinners, because they assumed, and thereby persuaded the public, that Lucia was insane. (Whenever Shloss catches Ellmann or Maddox in what seems to her a factual error, she records it snappishly—a tone inadvisable for a writer who, forced to swot up three decades of dance history, made some errors herself.) But the biographers are a side issue. None of Lucia’s letters survive as original documents. Nor is there any trace of her diaries or poems, or of a novel that she is said to have been writing. In other words, most of the primary sources for an account of Lucia Joyce’s life are missing. “This is a story that was not supposed to be told,” Shloss writes. Therefore she tells it with a vengeance.
Shloss says that Lucia was a pioneering artist: “Through her we watch the birth of modernism.” She compares her to Prometheus, “privately engaged in stealing fire.” She compares her to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. Insofar as these statements have to do with Lucia’s dance career, Shloss is as hard up for evidence as all other people writing about dance that predated the widespread use of film and video recording. What those writers do is quote reviewers and witnesses. But Lucia’s stage career was very short; Shloss is able to document maybe ten or twenty professional performances, and Lucia’s contributions to them were apparently not reviewed. Once, in 1929, when she competed in a dance contest in Paris, a critic singled her out as “subtle and barbaric.” Apropos of that performance, Shloss also quotes the diary of Joyce’s friend Stuart Gilbert: “Ballet yesterday; fils prodigue is a compromise between pas d’acier (steps of steel) and neo-Stravinsky.” This would be an interesting compliment if the prodigal son in question were Lucia, but what Gilbert is clearly describing is George Balanchine’s ballet “Le Fils Prodigue,” which had its première in Paris, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, three days before Lucia’s dance contest.
Shloss’s evaluation of Lucia as an artist is not limited to her dance career, however. Lucia, she tells us, collaborated with Joyce on “Finnegans Wake.” One of Lucia’s cousins, Bozena Berta Schaurek, visited the Joyces briefly in 1928, and in an interview fifty years later she recalled something from that visit: while Joyce worked, “Lucia danced silently in the background.” Joyce prided himself on his ability to write under almost any conditions, so if his niece saw him, once or twice, working in the same room where Lucia was practicing, this would not be surprising. But in Shloss’s mind Schaurek’s report prompts a vision:

There are two artists in this room, and both of them are working. Joyce is watching and learning. The two communicate with a secret, unarticulated voice. The writing of the pen, the writing of the body become a dialogue of artists, performing and counterperforming, the pen, the limbs writing away. The father notices the dance’s autonomous eloquence. He understands the body to be the hieroglyphic of a mysterious writing, the dancer’s steps to be an alphabet of the inexpressible. . . . The place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness. They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts but a language nevertheless, founded on the communicative body. In the room are flows, intensities. 


Shloss thinks that this artistic symbiosis went on for years and that out of it came the theme of “Finnegans Wake” (flow), its linguistic experiments, much of its imagery, and also, because dance is abstract, its quasi-abstract quality. In return for these artistic gains, Shloss says, Lucia’s life was forfeited. Transfixed by Joyce’s gaze, she became too self-aware. And magicked by her relationship with him—“one of the great love stories of the twentieth century,” Shloss calls it—she could never form an attachment to another man. Even years later, when Lucia is in the sanitarium and doing bizarre things—painting her face black, sending telegrams to dead people—Shloss believes that this was Lucia’s way of giving her father material. She wasn’t schizophrenic; she was working on “Finnegans Wake.”
This elevation of Lucia to the role of collaborator on “Finnegans Wake” is the book’s most spectacular act of inflation, but by no means the only one. The less Shloss knows, the more she tells us. On Lucia’s studies with Raymond Duncan, for example, she seems to have almost no information. But here, among many other things, is what she says on the subject:

Lucia’s mind was filled with the grammar of vitality, prizing the dynamic over the static order. She imagined herself in terms of tension and its release; she felt the anxieties of opposing muscle to muscle and the heady mastery of resistances, knew the peace of working with gravity and not against it. To drop, to rebound, to lift, to suspend oneself. To fall and recover, to know the experience of grounding oneself and then arising to circle to the edge of ecstasy. Priests danced, children danced, philosophers’ thoughts rose and fell in rhythmic sequence; lovers danced, and so did Lucia. 


This is what you get when you tear up letters on a biographer. Underlying that passage—indeed, the whole book—are many of the irrationalist formulas associated in the public mind with dance. Painting is an art, writing is an art, but dance is a religion, an immolation. It is primitive, it is sexual, it is Dionysiac. (Shloss gives us a talk on Nietzsche.) It is an ecstasy, an obsession—the Red Shoes. Therefore it is cousin to insanity. Shloss points us to Zelda Fitzgerald, who also threw herself into ballet in her twenties, also studied with Egorova, and also went mad. (The two women even ended up in the same Swiss hospital, though Zelda was gone before Lucia checked in.) Nijinsky, too, is invoked. And Lucia’s symptoms are repeatedly described as her way of dancing.
In some sections, however, Shloss forgets that she is writing a symbolist poem or a Laingian treatise and starts writing a biography. That, of course, is when she has some information to go on. At one juncture, she quotes from a history of Lucia that Joyce and his friend Paul Léon wrote for one of the hospitals that she was sent to: “The patient insists that despite her diligence, her talent and all her exertions, the results of her work have come to nothing. The brother, her contemporary, whom she previously idolized, has never worked at anything, is well known, has married wealth, has a beautiful apartment, a car with a chauffeur and, on top of it all, a beautiful wife.” Lucia herself said to a companion that her situation was “just as if you had been very rich, and collected many valuable things, and then they were taken away from you.” These are modest statements, about cars and money, not Dionysus, but they are the ones that make you want to cry.
Another poignant section of the book has to do with Joyce’s efforts on Lucia’s behalf. Joyce believed that Lucia’s problems were somehow inherited from him: “Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain.” (In fact, the fire may have been transmitted by Nora, whose sister Dilly spent a year and a half in a lunatic asylum.) He tried to find ways to heal her, please her. He bought her a fur coat (“My wish for you is warmth and beauty”), and when she lost it he bought her another one. To replace dancing, he persuaded her to take up book illustration—she drew lettrines, ornamental capitals—and he secretly gave publishers the money to pay her for her work. He didn’t think she was crazy; he thought she was special—“a fantastic being,” with her own private language. “I understand it,” he said, “or most of it.” If there was something wrong with her, maybe it was an infection, or a hormone imbalance. (She was given hormones, and also injections of seawater. The treatment of schizophrenia in those days was basically stabs in the dark, as it is still.) He spared no expense. In 1935, Léon reported that three-quarters of Joyce’s income was going to Lucia’s care. When the Germans invaded France, in 1940, and the family had to flee to Switzerland, Joyce practically killed himself in the vain effort to arrange for Lucia to go with them. Indeed, he may have killed himself. A month after the family arrived in Zurich, he died of a perforated ulcer.
Shloss loves Joyce for the pains he took over Lucia. The enemies in her book, apart from the letter-destroyers, are Nora and Giorgio—especially Giorgio, who, though by this time he spent his days in an alcoholic haze, was always forgiven everything by his family, and who, time and again, was the first person to say that his sister should be put away. Shloss repeatedly suggests—again, without evidence—that there may have been some sexual contact between Lucia and Giorgio when they were in their teens or earlier, and that Giorgio, in his rush to institutionalize her, may have been trying to silence her on this subject.
Shloss’s book is part of a tradition, the biography-of-the-artist’s-woman—a genre that is now about thirty years old, as old as its source, modern feminism. Its goal is to show that many great works of art by men were fed on the blood of women, who were then, at best, forgotten by history or, at worst, maddened by their exploitation and then clapped in an institution. In the latter cases—Shloss’s “Lucia,” Carole Seymour-Jones’s “Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius”—these books can be very indignant. (Not always. Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald basically comes down on Scott’s side.) When the woman is merely unacknowledged, the tone tends to be milder, as in Brenda Maddox’s “Nora”—which,pace Shloss, says that Nora was the primary inspiration for Joyce’s work—or Ann Saddlemyer’s “Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats,” which tells the weird story of how Yeats’s wife, Georgie, was the medium (literally) through which he reached the spirit world and thus found the subject of his late work. In recent years, possibly because most of the really shocking cases have been used up, the arguments seem to be getting subtler. In Stacy Schiff’s “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” we are shown a woman whose contribution to her husband’s work was to meld with him in the creation of a single, shared personality, which then wrote the books and lived the life—a curious phenomenon.
All these biographies, subtle or not, are valuable, and not only for the sake of justice (when that is what they achieve) but because they tell an important truth about how artists get their work done. Many people are brilliant, and from that you may get one novel, as Zelda Fitzgerald did. But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov)—to make a career—you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage. Lucia Joyce encountered obstacles and threw up her hands; James Joyce faced worse obstacles—for most of his writing life, publishers ran from him in droves—but he persisted. When the critics made fun of Zelda’s novel, she stopped publishing; when Scott had setbacks—indeed, when he was a falling-down drunk—he went on hoping, and working. Lucia and Zelda may have been less gifted than the men in question. But there is something else going on here, too, which the biographies-of-the-artists’-women record: that while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books. One can also gather it from biographies of the women who did not lose heart—for example, George Eliot, whose books were the product of a life custom-padded by her mate, George Lewes. (Phyllis Rose, in her “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages,” reports that for twenty-four years Lewes screened Eliot’s incoming letters, together with all reviews of her books, and threw away anything that might distress her.) Then there is Virginia Woolf, whose novels would never have been written had she not had non-stop nursing care from Leonard Woolf. Virginia knew this, and seems to have decided she deserved it, or so she suggests in “A Room of One’s Own.” But, male or female, once the artist walks into that private room and closes the door, a lot of people are going to feel shut out—are going to be shut out—and they may suffer. 



Saturday, November 22, 2003

Hari Kunzru / I am one of Them


I am one of Them


Why I refused a literary award sponsored by the xenophobic Mail on Sunday

Saturday 22 November 2003 01.56 GMT

I
'm writing this in a small town in south India, and being so far away from London literary gossip, I have been relatively insulated from the reaction to my decision to turn down the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. I chose to do so - and to do so publicly - because otherwise I would have felt like a hypocrite. I understand that some of the judges are angry at the use of the prize luncheon as a political platform. To them I can only apologise and say that sometimes questions of literary value are inseparable from politics. The presence of the Mail on Sunday as sponsor of the prize made this such a moment.

The John Llewellyn Rhys prize is a venerable British literary institution. It has been won by several writers whose work I admire, like Angela Carter and Jonathan Coe. I was, like any young novelist, honoured that a jury had chosen to shortlist my first published work. But if one is to take a book prize seriously, one has to ask about its function.
For the winning writer, this is obvious. It brings publicity and may constitute the first (perhaps faltering) steps towards inclusion in a canon. For a sponsor, it is a way of linking its product to the actual or supposed cultural value of literary activity. By accepting, I would have been giving legitimacy to a publication that has, over many years, shown itself to be extremely xenophobic - an absurdity for a novelist of mixed race who is supposedly being honoured for a book about the stupidity of racial classifications and the seedy underside of empire.

One of the ugliest developments in recent British political life has been the emergence of the "asylum seeker" as a bogeyman for middle England. I have spent some years feeling depressed about the extraordinary media hostility towards refugees, those claiming asylum and those (oh most horrific!) "economic migrants" whose crime it is to sneak into a rich country looking for a better quality of life.
This point of view does, of course, sell papers. There is a sector of the British public more than willing to buy tall tales of scrounging, criminality, disease and vice. The Mail has always been quick to cash in on prejudice, and its cynical promotion of ignorance over tolerance has always made me angry. The Mail's campaign to persuade its readers that they live in dangerous times, that the white cliffs of Dover are about to be "swamped" or "overrun" by swan-eating Kosovans or HIV positive central Africans would, in isolation, be merely amusing. However, the attitudes it promotes towards immigrants have real consequences. Bricks through windows. Knives in guts.
Standing up for refugees seems, at the moment, to be an unpopular cause. British politics addresses itself to the swing vote at the centre, the nervous middle Englanders. Thus the Blair government is keen to show how tough it can be, and we are presented with the unpleasant spectacle of privately run prison camps and a home secretary who always appears to be wondering aloud why They can't be more like Us.
My politics start from a different perspective. Britain is a wealthy country, and a safe country. We also have a reputation as a fair country, a reputation earned, paradoxically, by generations of hard-working imperial administrators who believed in the old-fashioned public school values that the Mail pretends to uphold. We have a duty of care for refugees, and it is distasteful to watch our politicians doing their best to shirk it, in order to persuade voters that their rose-trellised cottages are safe from the dark hordes across the Channel.
What is an "economic migrant" but someone who has followed that sage Norman Tebbit, and "got on their bikes to look for work"? Our global system promotes the free movement of capital, yet it prevents the free movement of people to follow that capital, which concentrates itself behind tightly controlled borders while the hungry look in, their appetites whetted by satellite TV images of the consumer wealth they are denied. Wouldn't you jump a train or hide in a lorry for a chance to live on the other side of that border? I know I would.
Every time you go to a restaurant, or stay in a hotel, or walk over a clean floor in a public building, you may be feeling the benefits of "economic migration". If you don't like Them coming Here, the solution isn't to chuck them in prison, but to redistribute global wealth so they don't have to. Only desperate people travel thousands of miles from home to clean toilets.
I want my work to help reduce prejudice, not reinforce it. Accepting this prize would, sadly, have been a betrayal of that principle. Instead, I have been afforded an opportunity to put a different case. For that I am grateful, as I am to my agent, Jonny Geller, who bravely delivered my statement to what I can only imagine was an icy reception at the Reform Club.

· Hari Kunzru is the author of The Impressionist. He asked the Mail to donate his £5,000 award to the Refugee Council.




Saturday, August 23, 2003

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy / Funny, peculiar




Funny, peculiar

Shocking in its time, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy still resonates today


Carol Watts

Saturdady 23 August 2003


Tuesday, September 14 1762. In East Hoathly, a small Sussex village, Thomas Turner, the local shopkeeper, recorded the usual entry for the day in his diary. "At home all day and pretty busy. In the afternoon employed myself a-writing. In the even Mr Tipper read to me part of a - I know not what to call it but Tristram Shandy."

Turner was familiar with the staples of 18th-century reading, from sermons and Shakespeare to the matter of the monthly reviews. But his consternation at quite what it was that his friend had brought along that evening suggests something of the impact of the most fashionable book of the age: Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

As the first volumes of this comic, wayward narrative emerged in the early 1760s, many critics were none the wiser. It did not conform to the narrative conventions of the telling of a biographical "life", since it started at the unhappy point of conception and took pages for the main character to be born.

The figure of Parson Yorick, the double of its author, an Irish Church of England minister (whose popular collection of sermons would be published under this pseudonym), dies in volume one - his demise marked by a black page - only to reappear for the rest of the tale.

The author's preface appears in volume three, chapters are jumbled and missing, a dedication is hawked to the highest bidder, and at one point the reader is offered a blank page with the invitation to draw his or her own version of the sexually frustrated Widow Wadman: "as like your mistress as you can - as unlike your wife as conscience will let you".

The narrative appeared curiously fragmented by numerous digressions and stories. Punctuation ran riot, with a breathless use of dashes, asterisks and squiggly lines. It seemed both dizzyingly tied to the present moment, the narrator noting that he was living "364 times faster than I should write", and at the same time anachronistic in its nostalgia for the time of an earlier generation, the Shandy family household of 40 years before.

Horace Walpole was intrigued, deciding that its strategy involved "the whole narration always going backwards". "I can conceive of a man saying it would be droll to write a book in that manner," he continued, "but have no notion of his persevering in executing it." Samuel Johnson was dismissive. It was "not English, Sir". "Nothing odd will do for long," he later reflected. "Tristram Shandy did not last."

Sterne's difficulty in keeping the novelty going throughout the nine volumes and eight years of the novel's publication between 1759 and 1767 suggests that Johnson had a point. What he recognised was that the book was a creature of the market, vulnerable to literary fashion. With a neat classical epigraph from Horace - "All dare to write, who can or cannot read" - Johnson had noted in his journal The Adventurer in 1753 that "so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose". Almost every woman too, for part of the crisis of this "epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper" was the rise of a generation of "Amazons of the pen".

Sterne's novel got under the skin of the public culture of its time. Its opening gambit, in which Mrs Shandy interrupts her husband as he religiously goes about his regular sexual duty on the first Sunday of the month with the euphemistic question "have you not forgot to wind up the clock?", reputedly changed relations between the sexes. As one pamphlet, The Clockmakers' Outcry, explained in 1760, no gentleman could wind his watch in public without a woman thinking he had designs on her, and the market for clocks was suffering. Many believed it, though the pamphlet may well have been written by Sterne himself, who knew the value of advertising.

Not only did the novel set numerous "writing mills a-going" in imitation, as one pamphlet had it, so many that its author had to authenticate with his signature all the copies of volumes five and six as they came off the press, it also reared its head in unexpected places. A racehorse was named after it, street ballads bawdily celebrated "playing Tristram Shandy, O!", financial tracts such as Thomas Mortimer's Every Man His Own Broker saw the stock market's susceptibility to rumour as a sign of the "reigning Shandean taste". Its author was feted in the best company, painted by Joshua Reynolds, and presented to the new king, George III.

Tristram Shandy's power to shock lay in its frank and comic acknowledgement of the libidinal energies that animated 18th-century life. In its exhortation to its readers, assembled "Sirs", "Worships" and especially "Madams", to "ride" the meaning of the narrative, Sterne called attention to the passional roots of the imagination, and to the "medicinal" nature of laughter, essential for the health of "the body politic as body natural". A scandalous line to take for a Yorkshire parson; decades later Sterne's writing was still seen by some as challenging the moral order of church and state.

But those who managed to read beyond the bawdy jokes and double meanings (which later anthologies such as The Beauties of Sterne quickly removed in favour of the more sentimental highlights), found something more: an acute satirical take on the "vices of the age" or, according to one comic pamphlet, a "political allegory" of its present, in which the nation had been plunged into a global war for empire, at great risk and cost to many, and huge commercial gain for a few.

If Tristram Shandy testifies to what we might now see as a culture fascinated by celebrity, it is also a critical response to those commercial forces that flow beyond the local trials of the book market to underpin economic adventurism and "curiosity" around the globe. What does it mean to be born into a world of risk and imaginative experiment, the novel seems to be asking, where the boundaries of the self and the body politic are suddenly remade? What are the human affections - the "trust" and "credit" - that bind people and their communities together, like readers and authors, in such a world? "Is a man to follow rules, or they to follow him?"

Sterne posed these questions in the form of an eccentric family saga, which is perhaps the nearest way of describing the story of Tristram Shandy. The son of a soldier who had died in Jamaica on an earlier campaign, Sterne had been used as a young child to the itinerant life of a military family, where the brutalities of 18th-century risk society were at their most intense. The child born into the pages of Tristram Shandy is surrounded by the anecdotal world view of a previous generation, above and below stairs, and in particular by the tales of the military veteran, uncle Toby, a patriot "of the old stamp" and bashful source of philanthropic feeling in the novel.Military veterans populate 18th-century fiction, often overly keen to relate their stories, as poet Charles Hanbury Williams describes in "The Old General": "If you name one of Marlboro's 10 campaigns, / He tells you its whole history for your pains." If there is something representative about Toby, he is also a register of a contemporary sense of grievance, since the Seven Years' war brought many discharged soldiers on to the streets, allowed to display their wounds and beg in shoddy recompense for their sacrifice.

Toby's foil is his brother, the hapless patriarch Walter Shandy, a rationalist who attempts to control all elements of risk in his son's life, even the physical pressure exerted in childbirth that might crush his manhood. It is science and determinism - and the newly invented forceps - that will keep the threatening realm of chaos at bay.

Like many texts from its time, Tristram Shandy weighs the values of the past to make sense of its uncertain present. Like Sterne's contemporary, Adam Smith, the novel portrays the "good soldier" as a touchstone of the moral values of fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice. Like the shopkeeper Thomas Turner, Walter Shandy finds order and security in quantifying. But there is a new kind of irony in Sterne's novel too: the consciousness of what it means to live the "strange absurdity" of a world that exchanges people for things. An absurdity, in the words of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, that had brought the warring nation to sacrifice "her best and bravest subjects for raw silk, hemp and tobacco... her hardy veterans and honest trades-men... for a box of snuff or a silk petticoat".

Tristram Shandy emerges bumpily into the world as an Enlightenment child who must learn, as in Kant's famous dictum, to dare to think for himself. And if he accepts the "hobbyhorsical" eccentricities of his family for the pleasurable coping mechanisms that they are, his life and opinions are less tolerant of the strategies of those in power. The novel's strong vein of comic dissent is summed up in the figure of Yorick, Shakespearean joker and memento mori, whose Cervantic tilting at windmills has a serious edge. Yorick hates "gravity": not seriousness as such, but sententiousness, the hypocritical acting out of authority, and rhetorical seduction. "More honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven."

There is undoubtedly a delight in revealing that the emperor is wearing no clothes in Tristram Shandy, which uses all comic means available to poke fun at power, and where the military language of fortifications turns into a euphemistic shorthand for sex. But there is also seriousness to its playful method, as the narrator explains: "Tis an undercraft of authors to keep up a good understanding amongst words, as politicians do amongst men - not knowing how near they may be under a necessity of placing them to each other." If the novel is suspicious of those who imagine the world on our behalf, it also claims the right to a writerly freedom: "A lesson to the world 'to let people tell their stories their own way'."Sterne wrote that "Tristram Shandy... was made to baffle all criticism - and I will venture to rest the book on this ground - that it is either above the power or beneath the attention of any critic or hyper-critic whatsoever." Nineteenth-century English critics largely concurred; as one wrote in 1811 with a certain bravado, an explanation of his volumes "would defy the highest ingenuity of man". Many expressed a moral disgust that lasted until FR Leavis's dismissal of Sterne's "irresponsible (and nasty) trifling" in The Great Tradition in 1948. But writers claimed his comedy for their own: Byron's Don Juan aimed to be a poetical Tristram Shandy, and Sterne haunts the humour and sentimental protest of Dickens.

In Germany, Sterne's work was quickly celebrated by Goethe and the Romantic movement, influencing the young Karl Marx who wrote a novel in imitation, and defended his own comic dissent in struggles with the Prussian censor in Shandean terms: "If seriousness is not to come under Tristram Shandy's definition according to which it is a hypocritical behaviour of the body in order to conceal defects of the soul, then... I treat the ludicrous seriously when I treat it ludicrously, and the most serious immodesty of the mind is to be modest in the face of immodesty."

It was not until the early 20th century that writers and critics in Britain began to celebrate their own modernist precursor: for Virginia Woolf, Sterne's writing brought the reader "as close to life as we can be", while the wordsmithery of James Joyce, in the same tradition of comic protest as his "fellow countryman", knew the seriousness of Sterne's formal absurdity.

Postmodernist fiction also pays its debt, as in the first page of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, where the postcolonial birth of a child and a nation acts out a version of the famous Shandean episode of the clock. Yet if Tristram Shandy now appears, as one bibliographer put it, "postmodernist in every sense except the moment in which it was written", this is surely to miss the point. Some historical moments generate extraordinary forms of critical and artistic reflection, reminders of writerly freedom, in which comedy provides the most daring kind of engagement. It may be that current circumstances make it possible to read what is at stake in this 18th-century story of "a COCK and a BULL... And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."

· Carol Watts lectures in English at Birkbeck College. She has just completed a book about Tristram Shandy and the Seven Years' war.

THE GUARDIAN


Sunday, August 3, 2003

Hugh Hefner / Fight for your right to party



Hugh Hefner

Fight for your right to party

Hollywood stars, champagne, bunny girls draped around sportsmen and title fight boxing in the back yard (women on the undercard, naturally): it's a tough life at the Playboy Mansion. Duncan Campbell watches Britain's latest boxing sensation slug it out in the unlikely setting of Hugh Hefner's pleasure dome

Duncan Campbell
Sunday 3 August 2003 23.39 BST



David Haye is being given his standard pre-fight neurological check-up to make sure that his faculties and reflexes are in working order. First, he has to touch his nose. 'My nose is really big, so that's easy,' he says. Then he has to put his feet together. Then he has to squeeze his fists open and shut. Then he has to subtract seven from 100. 'Ninety three.' Then he has to remember the words 'cow, apple and bus' long enough to repeat them to the satisfaction of his examiner. Then comes the clincher.
'Do you know where you are right now?'
He laughs, as well he might.
'The Playboy Mansion.'
And this is indeed the unlikely venue for the fifth professional bout of the handsome and savvy boxer from south London. Haye is already being described as a fighter in the style of Sugar Ray Robinson and one of Britain's finest prospects. He has arrived in Los Angeles on this July night after four knock-out victories in his first four fights. He has a silver medal as a heavyweight from the 2001 world amateur championships in Belfast and a 10-fight contract from the BBC. What better place to display his talent than the house that Hugh Hefner built?
The mansion is on Charing Cross Road but there are no second-hand book shops and noisy Chinese restaurants on this street, just big houses built in the classic Beverly Hills style. That is to say, mock-Tudor, mock-Elizabethan, mock-colonial, mock-mock, all with the 'armed response' signs that denote both the promise of the local Bel Air security company and the paranoia of the area.
The mansion is mock-baronial, complete with zoo and waterfall, grotto and shady cypresses, cinema and hot tubs and a traffic sign on the driveway that reads 'Playmates at Play'. Tonight is a Playboy boxing night, the third time that Hef has opened his grounds to the sports television channel ESPN to host half a dozen bouts in the garden.

Top of the bill is a middleweight title fight - although the titles on offer are largely meaningless - but we will also have a chance to see David Haye strut his stuff at cruiserweight and watch a couple of women's bouts.
Haye is standing on the tennis court at the back of the mansion where his examination has been taking place. He is remarkably relaxed.
'It's definitely the strangest venue I've ever fought in but I'd rather be here than in some shoddy hall somewhere.'
He has had plenty of these in his amateur career, the worst, he thinks, in Poland - 'a real dive, like a school gym' - where there were holes in a slippery ring. In two weeks time he will be back in England, fighting in Bethnal Green.
'It'll be a bit of a contrast but I'm looking forward to it.'
Los Angeles is in the midst of one of those warm spells that seem to last from around early January to late December but heat up slightly around July and August. Haye has never fought in the open air before. He is excited tonight, he says, because Roy Jones, the WBA and WBC heavyweight champion, will be there. Jones and Evander Holyfield are the fighters he most admires. His attentive trainer and manager, Adam Booth, who looks more like a young Hollywood television producer than the traditional gnarled cornerman, moves back into view to prepare his charge for the fray, so I head off towards the ring.
The first person I pass is a short man with unfeasibly black hair dressed in one of those pleated safari suits favoured by the heavier members of The Sopranos. He is on his mobile. 'Hey,' he is saying, 'you'll never guess where I am! The Playboy Mansion! Yes! No kidding!' The guests are about to arrive for the night and the complimentary bar and the food stalls - hot dogs, tacos, hamburgers, popcorn - are already open.
The guest list is a mix of Hollywood and the aristocracy of American sport. James Caan, a regular, is here, as is Kato Kaelin who is famous, well, because he was living in O.J. Simpson's garage at the time of Nicole Simpson's murder and has since managed to parlay those 14 and a half minutes of fame into a minor television career. There is the athlete Marion Jones and former basketball star Julius 'Dr J' Erving; Britain's heavyweight hopeful is here, an immaculately turned out Audley Harrison; and current players from many of the country's basketball and football sides. There are enough members of the LA Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, New Jersey Nets, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and San Diego Chargers here to launch a couple of franchises.

Since I am not exactly familiar with all of America's sporting heroes, I am fortunate that Bryant Horowitz, a young butler at the mansion, generously agrees to act as my spotter. With each new sighting, he delivers a fresh name. No spotter is necessary for Hef.
Here he comes with his six girlfriends. He is dressed in his trademark style, which is to say that he not only looks like the cat's pyjamas, he is wearing them, along with his silk crimson black-lined robe and a pair of sunglasses so dark I can't see whether or not he is winking. The girlfriends are dressed in - well, the nice in-house photographer, Elayne Lodge, has been taking pictures so you can probably see for yourself.
Hef, who has just thrown his seventy-seventh birthday party and is about to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, is amiability itself.
'Boxing for me has always been a guilty pleasure,' he says. 'It's inconsistent with my general philosophy which is "make love, not war" - on every kind of level. I grew up with Joe Louis, who was an idol, and the first fight I ever listened to on the radio with my father was the first of the Schmeling fights.' (Louis lost to the German Max Schmeling in 1936, but beat him at the Yankee Stadium in New York in 1938.)
'I'm old enough to have been there with a lot of really exciting fighters,' says Hef, as people start to take their seats around the ring and a white peacock and an African crane perch on a neighbouring shrub to get a decent view. 'Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard and [Rocky] Marciano and, of course, Muhammad Ali. He's been here two or three times for promotional things. Lennox Lewis was here not too long ago but not boxing, hanging out for a Sunday afternoon. I have been an Oscar de la Hoya fan but I don't think that there's anyone at the moment who feeds my imagination.'
There are women on the bill tonight wearing boxing gloves rather than bunny ears and fluffy tails. What does he feel about that?
'I feel mixed about women's boxing,' he says. 'It's there as a novelty but I don't like to see women get hit, even when they're wearing gloves. If I see a female boxer really start to get hurt, I have a very different reaction to it and I think most people do.'

Would he throw in the towel on their behalf if they were getting too badly hurt? 'That opens up many possibilities,' he says, and ponders for a moment. 'Would I ever throw in the towel where a woman was concerned? I don't know.'
He puts up with a bit of joshing from an ESPN show host who asks him if he identifies with boxers because they all wear a robe, and did he ever think of getting, say, "Boom boom" embroidered on the back of his? He didn't.
The ESPN guy then tells Hef that he has thought up a fighting name for him: 'Hard Right Hef'. 'I like it,' says Hef politely.
The first fight is about to start and a Playmate is preparing to do the bunny-dip between the ropes and let us know that Round One is upon us. Teri (in pink), Lauren (in yellow) and Penelope (in green) will share the task. They get a bigger cheer than the boxers.
Waiting her turn is one of the women fighters, Jo Jo Wyman, tattooed, corn-row hairstyle, big smile. Her Mom and Dad, Don and Pat, have arrived from Las Vegas to see her.
'It's no big deal to me,' says Jo Jo of fighting here. 'But I usually fight at casinos on Indian reservations.'
A personal trainer and former kick-boxer, she has been a pro for five years. Don and Pat Wyman - 'we're constantly getting mixed up with Bill Wyman' - are very proud of her.
'The first kick-boxing fight, I couldn't look,' says Pat, whose niece was a bunny. She is pleased that her daughter is performing at Hef's mansion.
'It's wonderful of him to open up his home like this.'
The battles have commenced. Serious stuff. No jokes about rabbit punches for the ref. Monroe Denson Brooks, a middleweight from south LA, dispatches his opponent with the sounds of peacocks and spider-monkeys almost as loud as the post-round applause.
He says afterwards, gloves off, sweat still pouring, that he liked the setting: 'Fighting is like nature's call and the peacocks in the trees here - it's all nature. I feel like they've all come to see me.'

'No distractions,' he says. 'I didn't bring my girlfriend because I didn't want any distractions.'
Out of curiosity, I make a brief visit to the mansion's zoo where Genevieve Gawman, a model and part of the Playboy family, is sitting in front of one of the cages that houses the two spider monkeys, Pepe and Coco.
Genevieve says that Pepe likes stroking long hair. She is into animal rights, she says, and a vegan and is pretty fit herself, she adds, demonstrating flexed forearms, biceps and abs. There are squirrel monkeys there, too, and some other shifty little creatures that I can't identify. Agents, possibly?
Back past the ring and opposite the waterfall, Ivan Goldman, a columnist with The Ring and KO magazine, is sitting at a table drinking 12-year-old Scotch - which is only about six years younger than some of the Playmates who are now wandering around hand-in-hand with some of the sports stars.
Goldman says of Haye 'he looked good' in as much as you could tell in 54 seconds.
'The problem with British boxers is they don't move their heads and they don't move their feet,' he says. This would certainly seem to put them at a disadvantage. 'They've got balls, they've got heart but they're not tricky enough.'
He likened them to the English Redcoats in the French and Indian war of 1755, striding cheerfully into battle in formation and being picked off by a craftier enemy. What about Lennox Lewis, I ask. Well, he grew up in Canada, says Goldman.
We wonder if mermaids are going to appear in the grotto, something I am sure I read about somewhere, but there is no sign of them tonight. Then a woman without fluffy tail or bunny ears says that the bar is closing. The bar is closing! I'm not too bothered since I have to drive home and have been on soft stuff all night but I didn't realise that the bar ever closed at Hef's. I had imagined that there was a fountain dispensing Laphroaig from one jet and Moët from another if one could but find it. Time to go.
Safari Suit is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he finally found someone who did believe where he was. Or maybe he was trying to get a phone number off Coco or Pepe.
One day, maybe, David Haye will be a champ. Then Safari Suit and I will be able to tell whomever we can find at the end of a mobile phone that we were there that night at the Playboy Mansion, along with James Caan and the white peacock and the African crane and all those line-backers from Tampa Bay, when the world champion, David Haye, had his fastest ever professional victory. But will they believe us?

Sunday, April 20, 2003

Hari Kunzru / Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle



Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle

An unseasonal rainy spell dampens novelist Hari Kunzru's impressions of Honduras. But things brighten up when he discovers the dazzling jungle life and Mayan ruins

Hari Kunzru
Sunday 20 April 2003 19.23 BST

The picture I have of the island of Roatan is the type tour operators put on Underground posters to traumatise winter commuters. Azure sea, white sand, central casting palm tree. I am supposed to be there, swinging on a hammock in the sun.
Instead I am standing in a striplit hall at San Pedro Sula airport staring out of a window at the tropical storm chucking water on the other side of the plate glass. It seems Honduras, usually dry at this time of year, is experiencing a late rainy season. Roatan airstrip is closed.
The boys at the airline counter wear philosophical expressions and make mention of God. Maybe a plane will take off today, they say. I am getting a kind of long-term feeling from them.
Five hours later and we are all bored, including the security guy and the woman tending the bar. No plane today, not now.
Time to head off in search of San Pedro Sula. I get my case from behind the airline counter and hunt for a taxi. Thus, I become the sole evening patron of the Garden Court restaurant at the Hotel Princess, where the court itself seems to be under an inch of water. It is a place of starched tablecloths, formally dressed waiters, four-line menu items and gilt. Lots of gilt.
Pleased to have a customer, the maitre d' signs for the muzak to be turned up. I listen to 'Bright Eyes', 'I Will Always Love You', 'Cavatina' and 'The Lady In Red', and eat something that may be chicken.
The next morning, I get up sharpish to return to the airport. Juan Carlos, my taxi driver, speaks good English - he learnt it in Indiana where he worked in a carwash, and sold some coke and heroin on the side. He got caught and spent two years in jail. You do some crazy things when you're young, he says.
We stop at a toll booth, where we find out that last night someone shot dead the goalkeeper of the national football team. They take football seriously, the Hondurans. In 1969 they fought the so-called Soccer War with El Salvador, a four-day conflict which kicked off as the two national teams met in the World Cup qualifiers. However, it turns out that this latest incident was just a bungled robbery. No politics involved at all.
Honduras was, of course, the original banana republic, a country governed through much of the twentieth century for the benefit of three rival US fruit firms, who bankrolled political factions and ruthlessly put down union movements.
During the Eighties, with fighting in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Honduras was the key to US control over the region, and American aid and troops poured in, a period which came to an abrupt close when it emerged that the rebels were partly funded by weapon sales in Iran.
These days Honduras is back to fruit and coffee, and its fortunes are governed by the ups and downs of the international commodity markets. American visitors are more likely to be tourists than CIA staff training Contra guerrillas.
After a decade of more or less peaceful democracy, the government is looking enviously at the success of Costa Rica, now known as a destination for travellers seeking a taste of the extraordinary environmental riches of Central America but nervous of its reputation for political instability.
With its rich, green landscape of fruit plantations, Honduras does look like a lovely country to visit.
By midday, I am so well settled in the departure lounge it's beginning to remind me of the Sartre play where the characters sit around, and then realise that hell is other people. In my case the other people are mostly mid-Western tourists trying to get out to the Bay island of Utila for the diving. The islands have been a fixture on the diving circuit since the Seventies, and are widely known for having great reefs and cheap PADI courses.

At the moment, though, these tourists are passing the time, playing cards, drinking beer, laughing at their caps' humorous slogans, showing off small, covetable pieces of technology, and reading books with titles like God Is My CEO , and Jesus Inc: Your Share In The Lord. 

They are doing nothing to me, but somehow I hate them. Especially the guy playing a pinball game on his laptop.
There is a flurry of excitement when a plane is announced to Utila. The dive tourists cheer, high-five each other and depart. But 10 minutes later they are back: it turns out that the break in the weather has closed up again.
I find I have certain rather Old Testament feelings about this. But, miracle of miracles, I find myself, just a couple of hours later, taking off. We coast over the water in a 15-seater twin-prop plane.
So, I reach Roatan's West Bay and the promise of the Paradise Beach Villas resort - only to find that water is pouring in a torrent off the thatched roof of the bar. High winds have been sending big waves crashing up the beach, far up enough to fill the beach-bar's sink with sand.
Water visibility is zero, so Liz from the dive school is not at work. The wind has even brought the TV cables down. The barman mixes mojitos for me and Wayne and Glady, retirees from Saskatchewan who have been coming to Roatan's West Bay every winter for the past five years.
The couple tells me it's the same every year - the nice apartment with cable TV and all mod cons, the glassy water, the sun, the good shrimp place just down the beach.
That is, it had been so until this year, when the rain had come down for the past 18 days. Wayne and Glady are booked in for five weeks. They are having doubts.
The rain comes and goes for the next two days. Even when it isn't falling, it's still grey and cold. With the beach out of action there's not much to do in West Bay so I drive into Coxen Hole to run errands with Bob, the laconic Texan manager.

Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.
Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.
At its best, Coxen Hole would be an unlovely coagulation of tin-roofed houses. With the rain sweeping household rubbish off the hillside and its streets churned into muddy ruts, it presents a particularly unappealing face.
Most tourists hate the place for its stray dogs, loafing drunks and one-room family shacks built on stilts to escape inundation by the sea. But after 48 hours in holidayland I am happy to be back in a real place, a place where you can buy a plastic bucket at the Wordy Boutique or get your hair cut at Shear's Delight.
I watch the Coxen Hole cops parade outside the station and help Bob buy provisions at a supermarket owned by one of the local families who have made a killing out of the tourist boom.
Land here is shooting up in value, some of it being developed for hotels, but much of it for retirement homes. Several units at Paradise Beach are owned by elderly American couples, the wives with leathery tans and small dogs, the husbands with the grizzled look of men who may well have got to know this place by doing 'government work' in the Eighties.
The day I leave, Roatan shows its other side. The sky is cloudless, the water tauntingly still and blue. I snorkel out to the reef and swim with brightly coloured fish. Then I let the sun dry me off, drink a farewell beer and reluctantly head for the airport. A party of Italians has arrived. They are laughing, promenading on the sand. I leave the sunshine on the beach and head to the jungle - where it is raining.
But I now have an opportunity to compare and contrast various styles of rain. Jungle rain has a different character from island rain. In the national park of Pico Bonito it comes off the hills, rolling down as mist and then disgorging an unimaginable volume of water over the beautifully landscaped grounds of the Pico Bonito Lodge. I'm back on the mainland, near the town of La Ceiba, staying in a hideaway for affluent eco-tourists, 20-odd discreet cabanas that offer immense comfort while giving the illusion of roughing it; no television in your room, but the magazine left by your bed advertises Fabergé pen trays and $2,000 alligator golfing shoes.

There are five guests at the lodge. Two American honeymoon couples and me. As far as I know, we are the only tourists wandering around this particular zone of natural beauty. (So what are the statistical chances that if you hike out to a river, strip naked and dive in, by the time you get out to the middle, all the others will have arrived on the bank?)
The next day the sun comes out and my companion and guide Herman ('I am jungle man') leads me to the 'Unbelievable Falls'. We wade through rivers. We scram ble up steep banks. Covered in mud, I enjoy myself immensely. On the way we see toucans, woodpeckers and other bird species. Unlike many of Pico Bonito's guests, I feel I can't get very worked up about birdwatching, and even though some of the small brown ones are rare/sing/behave unusually/can get you on the guest list for parties and so on, they don't really float my boat like a good toucan.
We pick cardamom, coffee beans and wild coriander. Agouti flee into the bushes as we squelch and slide our way up the path. This is the real point of a visit to the Honduran forest. If you're a keen naturalist, it must be like Christmas.
The staff at the lodge are knowledgeable and disarmingly enthusiastic. Over breakfast I had a long discussion with Kent, the manager, about the exact definition of a bract, with reference to the banana family. It doesn't rain the next day, either, so I leave to hike up into the hills, to the ruined Mayan city of Copan. Along with Tikal in Guatemala and sites such as Chichén Itzá in south Mexico, this is one of the top archaeological treasures of Central America.
Every stone here seems to have been intricately worked, and in the main ritual zone, pyramids and a ball court are laid out according to spookily-precise cosmological principles. The symbolism of the carvings is complex - rulers representing themselves emerging from the jaws of serpents, surrounded by corn spirits, figures of ancestors, crocodiles.
The Mayans are thought to have bound boards to the heads of their infants, to give their young an appealingly receding brow. They are also thought to have viewed crossed-eyes as the height of attractiveness - although my guide does concede it possible that this was actually due to incest, not to aesthetics.
Even the names of the kings - Eighteen Rabbit, Smoke Shell - give a sense of distance, a feeling that this was a society with profoundly different values from the one now organising coach tours to view the ruins. At the same time, it is true, certain local phrases and traditions are directly traceable to the people who abandoned this place in 900AD.

It is with reluctance that I leave this wealth of culture to fly home. As I leave for the airport the rain is coming down again.