Rushdie’s brave return

NICHOLAS LEZARD Victory City

By Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape £20

Aged nine, Pampa Kampana watches her mother, and all the women of the tiny province where she was born, build a huge bonfire and walk ‘unflinchingly’ into the flames.

The reason is ostensibly a humiliating military defeat in a battle not significant enough to have a name. Afterwards, the young girl is possessed by the spirit of the goddess Pampa, the local name of Parvati, lover of Shiva. That is: Pampa’s words start coming out of her mouth; the child herself is detached from them, but she becomes a prophet and a miracleworker, and later a poet.

This book purports to be the rediscovered manuscript of the 24,000 verses she wrote about the founding of the city of Bisnaga, towards the end of her 250-year-long life.

Towards the end of the novel, she is blinded by the returning king; in his absence (more wars), Pampa had made the city wonderful. The king accuses her of plotting to overthrow him and rule in his place, permanently. Pampa, who learned immediately after her mother’s death there was nothing that men could do that women couldn’t do too, including rule, replies, ‘I will say only that it is a kind of derangement in the world where a mere accusation, supported by nothing, feels like a guilty verdict. That way, madness lies for us all.’

The figure of the beleaguered storyteller has featured large in Rushdie’s work ever since the fatwa, under whose malign shadow he has now worked for by far the larger part of his creative life. He has reacted to this barbaric edict not only with unbelievable courage but with a fierce determination not to be silenced.

In August last year, Rushdie was very nearly killed by a fanatic, unborn at the time the book that engendered the fatwa, The Satanic Verses, was published; it was reported that he could lose an eye.

Whether he has or not I do not know; neither do I know whether he wrote the passage about Pampa’s blinding before or after the incident. Knowing how long it takes for a book to reach print, and suspecting that one might feel disinclined to work after such a horrific assault, I would suspect that it came before.

In which case, we are very much in the realm of life imitating art; or, to put it another way, of the word having power over the world.

It is the kind of thing one could expect to happen in … well, a Salman Rushdie story.

Rushdie has always placed the story as the whole point of narrative. The first book he wrote after the fatwa, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, goes in the guise of a children’s story about the poet Rashid, who loses the ability to tell them. ‘Rashid’ is a cognate of ‘Rushdie’. It’s not the only time he’s given a story-teller a similar name to his own.

There is a great moment in Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, where Amis starts mocking Rushdie for his love of Samuel Beckett; and Rushdie ends up offering to fight Amis outside.

I am wholly with Rushdie on this, but I remember at the time thinking: what on earth does Rushdie, the flamboyant, outrageously inclusive, crammingeverything-in stylist have in common with Beckett, who strips everything to the bone? And then I remembered his hero Malone, who on his deathbed passes the time by telling himself stories.

Other Beckett characters do the same. Malone is somewhat disparaging of his own efforts (‘what tedium’), but the impulse is similar.

Victory City is both one story and also lots of stories. They are written in a way that will not come as a surprise to the reader of Rushdie although, unlike much of his work, this book is entirely set firmly in the past.

A character says in The Satanic Verses that ‘information got abolished sometime in the 20th century … since then, we’ve been living in a fairy story’, and the fairy-story element has been a constant throughout Rushdie’s writing life. If you are immersed in the tradition of the

Mahābhārata, then it will be much more familiar and less of a struggle – but maybe less of a wonder, too – to get through.

At one point towards the end, Pampa says, ‘Let’s go to the roof of the Elephant Stable,’ and her companion thinks, exasperatedly, ‘More elephants.’

And I kind of know how this companion felt.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets

Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

A thespaurus

Robert Bathurst

The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern

By Peter Ackroyd

Reaktion Books £20

Peter Ackroyd has given us another sweep through history, roaring through the centuries. This time, we learn about the origins of spoken performance in England and how the art of acting has developed.

He takes us from the sacred rituals and liturgical dramas of the 11th century, through the miracle plays, morality plays and mystery plays up to the 1560s and the emergence of professional actors who are ‘well arranged and openly speaking’ with a proficiency in ‘cunning, voice and person’, reaching into the present day.

The Englishness of this study is not examined deeply. There is mention in the prologue of the contrasting styles and approaches of English, American and European theatre.

The primary distinction, Ackroyd says, is that English actors do not like to be told what to do. They resist the auteur and any passive acceptance of the director as demiurge. English acting is rooted in the play instinct, he says, of make-believe, a belief in a different reality of which one is part.

Much of the book focuses on the lives of actors renowned in each new generation, their careers, achievements and rivalries. As one would expect from an Ackroyd history it also draws vividly on the social atmosphere of each succeeding era, the fashion, behaviour and style, and how these informed theatrical production and performance.

Ackroyd paints for us a huge historical canvas but there is, perhaps inevitably, a nagging void in our understanding of what qualities it takes to be a successful actor.

He attempts to explain this by presenting all the major players of each era, the battles they fought and the parts for which they have been celebrated. Their technique is explored, their bravery and indomitability well described, but an analysis of that ephemeral quality that allows the actor to engage emotionally with an audience remains elusive and undefinable.

A study of the idolised actor David Garrick (1717-79) gives some clue as to why this should be. It was said that he could make others feel while himself remaining quite detached – ‘spellbinding on the boards but ordinary and unimpressive in life’.

Even today, we yearn to believe that the essential character of the actor is being expressed in their performance.

‘Perhaps it is true,’ says Ackroyd, ‘that at the centre of many great actors there lies a vacancy.’ Of Henry Irving, George Bernard Shaw said that if you looked closely at him, you would find that he has no face.

The great actor’s practical preparation for a part is well illustrated. Garrick carefully observed a man driven insane by grief and was said to have learned from what he saw how to act the king’s madness.

Edmund Kean attended a hanging and declared that, in his next performance, ‘I’ll imitate every muscle of that man’s countenance.’

Many actors resist articulating what it is that they do to engage an audience. Ralph Richardson deflected the question by saying, ‘Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.’

Having described so well the developments and advances in theatre and performance over several centuries, the book becomes a litany of actors, resembling a dictionary of biography.

Ackroyd quotes critics (the 1960s and ’70s are heavy with the opinion of Kenneth Tynan) and also, enjoyably, displays some of his own passions. Peggy Ashcroft shines brightly in his estimation, and he posits that in 1930s theatre the true heart of the period lay with music-hall performers.

Actors from the late-20th century and more recent times are listed exhaustively in a hall of fame with little analysis of their work. Their position in contemporary culture is without question but their place in history is uncertain.

This knocks the book off balance but throws up some choice vignettes, such as Paul Scofield’s ability to get the audience ‘to enter the drama, not merely to observe it’ and Glenda Jackson’s acting being ‘like stripped wood, with all the splinters on display’.

The book is colourfully informative about the bridge between the premodern and modern ages in acting, the Elizabethan period with its rapid expansion of theatres, actor management and, later, the aspirations of the acting profession to attain a position in society.

As we would expect from Ackroyd, there is a lot of entertainment and enjoyable, ornate characters. The hysterical popularity of child actor William Henry West Betty inspired Mrs Jordan to exclaim, ‘Oh for the days of King Herod!’ Top billing goes to Shakespearean actor Will Kemp for Morris dancing from London to Norwich and walking backwards to Berwick. It wasn’t acting but, then, what is?

Kill your darlings

TANYA GOLD Two Sisters

By Blake Morrison Borough Press £16.99

Blake Morrison may think he has written a memoir about his dead sisters but he has, unconsciously, written a book about himself.

Who are they? There is his younger sister, Gill, ‘the plump pink infant with golden curls the ballet dancer, pony girl blazered schoolkid, Bee Gees fan’, who became an alcoholic and later went blind.

There is Josie, his younger half-sister, the child of his doctor father (the subject of Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?) and his mistress Beaty, who was brought up near her siblings in Yorkshire, though the matter was not spoken of.

‘We knew he loved us,’ says Morrison of his father, ‘but his love allowed no room.’

I think Gill, the reluctant subject of a memoir, would identify with this. Josie killed herself by overdosing on insulin. Gill killed herself by overdosing on alcohol. Two dead sisters. Isn’t that a book?

The most telling anecdote comes from childhood: Gill and Blake are getting on a boat. He makes it safely, but the boat pulls away and Gill is stranded between land and sea. She screams his name, but he does nothing. Morrison was ashamed of Gill then, and he is still ashamed.

The father was noisy and charismatic; the mother was shrivelled and compliant. Do their children re-enact this dynamic?

Perhaps, with the unacknowledged sibling Josie, there wasn’t room for them all. Gill had to be made small, to disappear, and she complied. She went to London and worked as a seamstress, was caught stealing from her flatmates and came home to her father, who locked her in the cellar as punishment. She married a kind man, Wynn, had two children, and began her career of self-destruction, while her brother became a magpie.

The alcoholic memoir is a noble genre, but I’m not sure it has ever been done quite so ungenerously. The best is Candia McWilliam’s What to Look for in Winter – or, in fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Simply put, Morrison doesn’t understand Gill and her desire to drink herself to death. For instance, he supplies a list of possible reasons for Gill’s condition but omits to mention that alcohol is addictive. He has no insights into her life at all: hence the boring digressions on Chekhov and Henry James.

So his only real function here is to stand around tutting while Gill performs various self-destructive acts that inconvenience him: ‘She’d had a knack of phoning at inconvenient moments.’

Gill emerges thinly from Morrison’s pen, which is telling in itself: alcoholics are vivid in life.

Of course, it is because he avoided her. ‘Why am I so cold that I prefer to spend my time writing about not seeing her rather than seeing her?’ he asks, but he doesn’t answer the question. So I will: he prefers to meet her on his own terms, in a book written when she is dead.

‘I never hated her,’ he insists, but he does despise her. ‘She didn’t go to plays even when her eyesight was good,’ he marvels. ‘She didn’t go to exhibitions, ditto. She didn’t go to concerts.’

He complains that she kept his

‘It’s Little Bear sexting again’ mother’s ring, which was promised to his wife, and that she was ‘canny’ enough to keep a valuable painting.

After she died, ‘It turned out that Gill had made a funeral plan,’ he writes, but ‘the plan didn’t amount to much’. What do we expect from ‘an under-achiever’?

But she was, at least, a full sister. When Josie dies, he quotes Voltaire. Gill gets Hamlet, while Morrison wonders if, with two sisters dead, he is like Ted Hughes.

One of her last acts, before she died of heart failure on the floor between the radiator and the bed, was to crawl to the fridge and stick her hand in a tub of margarine. It made an imprint. ‘I thought of a glass plaque with my handprint that had been made at some literary festival,’ he writes, ‘and which I kept on my windowsill at home. Would Wynn keep Jill’s handprint as a memorial? The margarines would go mouldy in time. He’d have to take a photo.’

I wonder if guilt drives him, but anger is the engine of this book, along with vanity and a terrible self-deception. ‘Her great dread was to be noticed,’ he writes, ‘to be categorised, patronised, marked out,’ and this, then, is his posthumous revenge. ‘I don’t want to rob her of her dignity,’ he adds.

It’s too late for that, of course, but the siblings are still eerily conjoined. In taking Gill’s dignity, he took his own.

Broadcaster’s news

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE Confessions: Life Re-examined

By Edward Stourton Doubleday £20

Three subjects once forbidden in dinner-party conversation dominate Edward Stourton’s memoir: sex, religion and politics.

A fourth – class, the snob factor – has been used against him in his career as an international correspondent and anchor of the Today programme.

As John Prescott, lapsing into lucidity, put it live on Today, ‘He’s descended from 19 barons,’ which is almost true. Certainly Stourton is aware of the mixture of ‘faith and snobbery’ that moulded him at the Benedictine public school of Ampleforth.

In this connection, a rare misapprehension escapes him: that Dom, the style by which Benedictine monks are addressed, is an acronym standing for

Domine Optime Maxime. Someone might have been pulling his leg, for it is no such thing, but a shortening of the Latin dominus

Recently an element of ‘awokening’ has stirred Stourton’s life. He first noticed it perhaps as the compassion taught by reporting on events. It is certainly no unreflective tribal pursuit.

Now 65, he has been living with prostate cancer for seven years. He expects to make it into his seventies but not his eighties. This lends seriousness to his self-examination, though its telling is through mostly ridiculous incidents.

Rich absurdity struck on Today when he was interviewing the French author Michel Houellebecq, who did not speak English ‘in the normal sense of the phrase’, giving monosyllabic answers to ever more prolix questions. Then his ready and unelaborated agreement that his latest book was ‘pornographic sometimes, yes’ left no way out but an early transfer to the sports news.

Early in his book, Stourton condemns St Augustine’s Confessions as a monument to ‘spiritual pride’, which makes his own title Confessions a bit of a hostage to fortune. But if he finds Augustine ‘very difficult to like’, Stourton, as millions of Today listeners know, is a sympathetic chap.

Part of his character that he reexamines is implicit conservatism. ‘What marked my childhood was not being posh or cosmopolitan,’ he writes. ‘It was the belief that the past had, on the whole, been better than the future was likely to be, and that its values should be honoured.’

But when Theresa May declared, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,’ he found his experience had been ‘precisely the reverse’.

Born in Lagos, he was once helped in later life getting a visa to cover the Nigerian elections by an official at the consulate in London putting down his race as ‘Black African’.

Glittering prizes had come to him at Cambridge (President of the Union, member of the Pitt Club). His broadcasting career throve early – and saw some early falls. By an irony, ‘being fired from Today gave me a higher profile than any other event of my career’.

A straw in the wind was catching sight of a document not addressed to him, about the Today rota: ‘If you need to fill a gap, try Stourton or Montague – they are cheaper than Humphrys or Naughtie.’

In 2018, Stourton was made to look again at memories of happy school years by an official report about sexual abuse at Ampleforth decades earlier. He recalls no open sexual misbehaviour as asserted in the report, but the landscape of schooldays, already stripped of silly Brideshead snobbery, was now covered by bitter ashes.

Stourton does not discuss the BBC’s own history of abuse, scandalously exemplified by Jimmy Savile’s career. That, to be fair, was not part of Stourton’s life story.

His own place in the Catholic Church was modified by his being divorced and remarried, and thus unable to receive Holy Communion. By another irony, success in presenting the Sunday programme meant that he lost the habit of going to Mass on Sunday mornings.

The TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? made a discovery the producer hoped would provoke an emotional response. A Lord Stourton in Elizabeth’s reign had put his name to the condemnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, to death – a betrayal of Catholic loyalties. Here was the very document.

‘Could I squeeze out a tear or two, or even a gasp of shock? I could not.’ It was centuries ago and the peer had confessed, with his own tears, as death approached, to plenty of other acts of betrayal.

The election of Pope Francis in 2013 has for Stourton meant ‘the return of cheerful Catholicism’. He and his wife have filled with books a house in France where he sits, happily writing.

Christopher Howse works for the Daily Telegraph