a wonderrful performance in a pub

By chance I found myself in the Dolphin pub in Sydenham, just as they were about to start the matinee performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I looked at the programme and I didn’t see a single name I had ever heard of. The last time I saw the play was at the National, directed by Peter Hall. I must confess I found that production immensely cumbersome and boring, in spite of Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell. I was seized by curiosity to see how Wilde would fare in an outer borough of London.

I intended to leave in the interval, but couldn’t. I was amazed, thrilled. I could never have imagined I could see a better performance of the play in the back garden of a pub in Sydenham than in the National, but this was the case. The director, Jonathan Kaufman, had a perfect sense of timing, and rhythm and so did his actors The play flew along as a smoothly and at such speed as a symphony in the hands of a good conductor. The actors were all young, full of energy, passion and intelligence – they made Wilde’s wit sparkle in every sentence. It was a fast performance, yet nothing was lost. I was particularly struck by the actress playing Gwendolen, Rosalind Parker, Joseph Attenborough (Algernon) and Tom Franck (Jack Worthing)– but, with a single exception, they were all good.

This brilliant production shouldn’t be playing in the garden of a pub in Sydenham, but at the National or at the West End. Each performance would be sold out and all these young actors would be famous.

Stephen Vizinczey

A revised and amended Truth and Lies in Literature in Kindle.

I haven't been in my blog for ages - you either write your books or blog. But to those of you who are interested, there is a new edition of "Truth and Lies in Literature" published as a Kindle book.I discarded some of the original pieces which did not seem to meet the test of time. This Kindle edition includes most of the pieces in the previous printed editions, but none of them are simple reprints. All the pieces underwent some alterations. Every time they were translated for a foreign journal or for a foreign edition, I looked them over to see whether they could be improved and whether anything new that I had learned about the subject should be added. As I have said all too often, I am not so much a writer as a re-writer; I don’t revere my old mistakes, my old ignorance, or my incomplete thoughts.


To the revised versions of the pieces which were printed in the original 1983 and 1985 and the 1990 printed editions, I added "The Anatomy of Serious Rubbish or the Bay of Pigs of the American Literary Establishment" - and several essays whichappear here in English for the first time. Among these are “The Power Of Literary Criticism” and my foreword to the French edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, arguing that Mark Twain’s later works far surpass his celebrated boyhood novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I demonstrate, I hope, why Mark Twain remains the most important American writer to this day, a giant of world literature. My Stendhal essay includes now 30 years of constant study.

the more people you kill the less good it does to you.

The latest revelations from the Afghan war seem to prove what I argued in THE RULES OF CHAOS. The more people you kill the less good it does to you. Or to put it in a more scholarly way: every enemy killed increases the number of enemies exponentially. The killing of a civilian, especially a child, increases the number of enemies even more. Parents, in-laws, relatives of every person killed turn against the West. They may not take up arms and they may not join the Taliban, but they will certainly not oppose anybody who wants to kill those who killed their loved ones. The idea that it makes any difference that the killing was unintended shows that neither the generals nor their political masters know much about human nature. As the newly released documents illustrate what has actually been evident for years, NATO has been creating more enemies of the West by the day. They are a great many more Afghans and Pakistanis today who hate the West than there had been when NATO invaded. Yet Nato soldiers continue to die, unknown numbers of Afghans and civilians die, and the wealth of our countries drains away by hundreds of billions in the cause of creating more enemies for the Western Powers and Western values, making us weaker and more vulnerable.

The intellectual harm caused by this senseless and counterproductive war should not be underestimated either. Just as a man who keeps hitting his head against the wall lose our respect, so do our leaders who are doing the same thing with other people’s heads.

All that a great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible.


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rereading / rewriting / a great phrase

My thanks to those who wrote that they read In Praise of Older Women again and liked it better than the first time. I would like to persuade you to re-read again all the books you liked. Every few years you should try to reread your favourite books. If they aren't really good you will realize it when you read them the second time and you can abandon them after a few pages. Bad books get worse on rereading and good books get better. To read a good book once is like listening to a symphony once.... Rosemary asked me about my spoof Galileo about media objectivity. Alas, I have only the script. In those days plays were recorded on huge machines on huge reels of tape - I could have made a copy in the CBC studio, but saw no point as I would have no way of playing it back. Maybe I'll update it one day.... The best thing about being back in print in England is getting new friends through In Praise of Older Women. One of them is the brilliant writer a.a. gill: his pieces are full with great phrases that strike me with envy - I wish I wrote them! Here is his description of a pearl necklace: "a seculary rosary, the prayer beads of mammon."...

Galileo

Ian Hislop's brilliant article Politics and Humour in this week’s Radio Times about the impossibility of impartial humour, reminds me of the time I was writing and producing an arts/politics public affairs show for CBC Radio 3 in Toronto, where I learned that media impartiality meant that truth and lies must be treated with equal and uncritical respect. I got so sick of this that I wrote a radio play for my slot, called "Controversial Issues". It was about
Galileo - an Italian immigrant to Canada who had just discovered that the Earth moves around the Sun. To examine in depth Galileo's startling claim our reporter interviewed government scientists and leading politicians who talked out of both sides of their mouths, various wise persons, and people on the street, and at the end of it you heard everything, leaving you no
wiser whether the Sun moved around the Earth or whether it was the other way around. The play concluded with an apology for the previous week's program about Hitler, in response to listeners’ objections to its lack of impartiality. We apologized for saying that Hitler killed millions of people without pointing out that he has also eliminated unemployment. I produced the play with leading Canadian actors, using recorded music between the scenes. Management got wind of it, and banned it. I said if they don't let me broadcast it, I will quit and go to the papers telling them why. ‘No, no, no,’ said the head of radio, ‘We are not against satire, it is just that you don't have much experience as a director and we think the play is so wonderful that we will commission original music for it and give it a better time-slot.’
They re-recorded the play replacing the stars in my production with third-rate actors. And they used the same records I used, with this difference - they brought in the music earlier, drowning out all the lines that hit home, all the punch lines... It was one of several incidents that convinced me that I wouldn’t have a happy and secure future with the corporation and must get out.

Recent condemnation of Israel

The recent condemnation of Israel is a fine example of the selective outrage that ensures that there will never be peace on Earth. “We rain rockets on the Israelis, on their farms, on their nurseries, their schools. We explode bombs in their restaurants, in their supermarkets – we are going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth! But they are so evil, they want to live, they get angry, they hit back, they try to defend themselves! Condemn them!”

I just read Norman Stone’s World War One

I just read Norman Stone’s World War One, A Short History (Penguin), and I couldn’t put it down. At one point Stone refers to Oh! What a Lovely War, Richard Attenborough’s stupendous film, and this scholarly book has the same spirit. What comes through in the film in songs, in the high comedy of staff officers jumping on other staff officers’ backs, the bleak hospital scenes, the shockingly sudden increase of mass graves, is a scholarly work here, with all the significant events, facts, connections noted and explained. And the writer counts on his reader’s intelligence, nothing is belaboured; there are no redundant passages or redundant words in the book.

Richard Attenborough and Norman Stone could be twins, working in different fields but sharing the same critical and creative intelligence, the same eye for telling details that reveal the characters of historic figures as well as villains you never heard of. They share the same gift for economy, the same heart that beats for ordinary people whose lives are turned into tragedies by the big shots. For that very reason it isn’t depressing, because it is infused with a sense of human solidarity. However terrible the world is, we are not alone. If you loved Oh! What a Lovely War and want to know who did what to whom, this is the book for you.