Having reviewed The Libertine I’m in something of a Rochester mood at the moment, rereading a few of my favourite poems. If you don’t know his work I’m guessing that you will be familiar with one brief rhyme notwithstanding;
God bless our good and gracious King, Whose promise none relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.
The good and gracious King is, of course, Charles II, with whom he had a rocky relationship. Rochester is such an intriguing man, the best example of the Restoration rake, very much in the fashion set by the monarch himself, and the most trenchant critic of the debauchery of the age, allowing some to suggest that he might even have been a secret puritan!
He was nothing of the kind: he was an atheist - only giving way to belief when his brief life drew to a close - and a cynic, bitingly critical of any form of hypocrisy; and there was no time in history more clothed in hypocrisy and double-dealing than Restoration England. Rochester’s Satyr against Mankind compares with anything Jonathan Swift ever wrote on the subject.
As for Charles the above verse is mild compared with some of the merciless lampooning to which he was subjected by the poet;
In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown For breeding the best cunts in Christendom, There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive, The easiest King and best-bred man alive. Him no ambition moves to get renown Like the French fool, that wanders up and down Starving his people, hazarding his crown. Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
Nor are his high desires above his strength: His scepter and his prick are of a length; And she may sway the one who plays with th' other, And make him little wiser than his brother. Poor Prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court, Will govern thee because it makes thee sport. 'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive, The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive. Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't, 'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt. Restless he rolls about from whore to whore, A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
It’s easy to criticise Charles for his sexual excesses but it’s also as well to praise him for his indulgence. For these verses, which would certainly have meant death in the age of Henry VIII, or, indeed, in the France of Louis XIV, the king’s cousin and contemporary, Wilmot was exiled from court for a brief seven week period. A good, gracious and tolerant King!
For me Rochester is the true laureate of the age, far more than John Dryden, providing so much insight to the great highs and the even greater lows. He was never a puritan but he was most certainly a rebel, the kind of person who never rests easily alongside cant and dissimulation.
After singing Psalm the 12th He laid his book upon the shelf. And looked much simply like himself; With eyes turned up, as white as ghost, He cried, ‘Ah Lard, ah Lard of Hosts! I am a rascal, that thou know’st.
I read Graham Greene’s Lord Rochester’s Monkey, his biography of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, arguably the greatest poet, satirist and wit of the age of the Restoration, when I was seventeen. From this I moved to the poetry, much of it gloriously obscene and utterly delightful. So, I liked Wilmot before Johnny Depp, taking on the part of the great libertine, announced at the beginning of The Libertine, a 2004 movie based on his life, that I would not like him, meaning I would not like the poet as a man as opposed to not liking the actor as the poet. Phew!
Seventeenth century England, particularly the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, is my area of particular expertise. The disadvantage in this is that I tend to find historical dramas set in the time immensely irritating, usually because of the cavalier treatment of basic facts (I know, I know; it’s such a bore!). I absolutely hated To Kill a King, set in the Civil War. I did not, therefore, have high expectations of The Libertine, which I saw recently on DVD for the first time.
Surprise: I liked it: I liked Johnny Depp as Wilmot, a first class performance, one of tremendous depth; I liked the feel of the movie, I liked its depiction of Restoration London and Restoration manners. I liked it so much that I was even able to overlook the howling liberties (a syphilitic Wilmot swaying opinion in the Lords during the Exclusion debate!) The script, adapted by Stephen Jeffreys from his play of the same name, was raw and uncompromising, as was the camera work, showing an unremittingly grimy London, corruption and filth in the streets, corruption and filth in the most elevated social circles.
I had fun looking at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, most of them carping and negative, most of them mired in incomprehension. Directed by Laurence Dunmore, the film felt like the play from which it emerged, the emphasis being on words and language than action for the sake of action, the first point on which the critics seem to have stumbled. The second was probably their incomprehension over Depp’s performance, not at all what one expects from a Caribbean pirate! But he was so good as Rochester, obnoxious, self-destructive and unremittingly cynical, the perfect mirror of an imperfect age.
He was Rochester as I imagine him, a complex character, loveable and yet not easy to love, angelically satanic, a troubled genius before people knew what a troubled genius was; a Marquis De Sade with intelligence. His life was his art and his art his life. I see him showing signs of existential nausea, a disease of the spirit that really only became fashionable in the last century.
Were I a spirit free, to chose for my own share What sort of flesh and blood I pleas’d to wear, I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear, Or any thing but that vain animal Who is so proud of being rational.
Wilmot, if you had seen Depp in your shade you would, I feel sure, have been beguiled and amused. You might even – I hope this is not a step too far – have begun to like yourself.
It’s the most fearsome court you will ever face. There you are, standing in a long hall. At the far end sits Osiris, the god of the underworld. To approach him you have to pass a gauntlet of terrifying mummified gods. If you are not already scared out of your wits the Swallower of Shades, the Bone Breaker and the Eater of Entrails should send you into a condition of total collapse. Just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do. Here comes the prosecutor, Thoth in the shape of a baboon, sitting on top of a pair of scales that will shortly determine your eternal fate.
Nil desperandum. You have long prepared yourself for this court that no mortal can escape: you have taken out an insurance policy; you have in your hands the Book of the Dead, a sort of Rough Guide to the afterlife, with all sorts of helpful hints on how to address the locals, no matter how elevated.
In Ancient Egypt life was nasty, brutish and short. No, let me rephrase that: it was nasty, brutish and very short. Everywhere one is surrounded by a cult of death, by reminders that this life is a mere antechamber to eternity. The Book of the Dead is therefore an essential acquisition for the literate, full of helpful spells and incantations. We call it the Book of the Dead for obvious reasons, but for the Egyptians in the shadow of the pyramids it was known as the Book of the Coming Forth by Day.
This fascinating document is the subject of an exhibition in the British Museum, scheduled to run until March. Do go if you can; it’s a journey that you are unlikely to forget, taking a path trodden thousands of years ago into the heart of Egyptian mythology, magic and mysticism; a path trodden by the ba, the spirits of the dead.
There is a tunnel at the end of which lies the promise of eternal life, provided one can negotiate a way past the terrors ahead, not just the ultimate judgement but all sorts of demons and monsters. The book is full of spells for fighting off crocodiles and serpents, animal and insect terrors of all sorts, including an entity simply known as The Creature that Swallows the Ass!
Using the right words, one is able to avoid decapitation and decomposition. Another possible danger was being turned upside down, which entailed, as the Egyptians saw it, a reversal of the digestive process. The Book is even prepared for this, some versions including a spell “for not eating excrement or drinking urine in the underworld.”
So, the ba has made it this far, through a series of portals, each guarded by a terrifying gatekeeper. Safe passage has depended on saying the right words, all contained in your guide. The most important test of all comes in a place called the Hall of the two Maats, where Osiris presides with his forty-two companions, where one’s earthly conduct is weighed in the balance, weighed on scales presided over by Anubis, the jackal-headed god. In one pan sits the image of truth; in the other your own heart.
This is it; this is the ultimate test. If one has led a good life the scales will balance. If they do not then the next appointment is with the Devourer, a dreadful beast with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion and the haunches of a hippopotamus. The Devourer feasts on the hearts of those who have failed, which involves a second death, one of complete oblivion. Don’t panic, even if you have not exactly lead a blameless life. Open your Book at spell 30B and repeat slowly;
O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my different forms! Do not stand up as witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance.
The interesting thing about this is that while the Egyptians were the first to conceive of a direct relationship between one’s eternal fate and one’s conduct while alive, they still believed it possible to avoid unpleasant consequences in death by trickery. Their gods may have been awesome but they were clearly not all-knowing! In theory, therefore, it would have been quite possible to have been a thoroughly bad person in life and still make it into celestial bliss. It was the Christians who carried the process of judgement through to a logical conclusion.
So, you’ve made it; you have found a way through; the court has declared you blameless. What next, you may wonder? The goals are actually quite varied, differing from Book to Book. In one you might sail with Ra, the sun god, in his chariot across the sky; in another you would live in the underworld, blessed by the presence of Osiris. The third and most common possibility was to live in the Field of Reeds, essentially a divine and perfect version of all that you knew on earth. There the corn grew to unimaginable heights.
Corn? But surely that involves sewing and reaping; surely that involves, ahem, work? Again there is no need for concern, for the Book of the Dead is ready to provide you with one final service. Amongst the things you have carried into the underworld is a small figurine called a shabti. Simply recite spell 6 and it will do all the work for you. Relax; lie back and do whatever one does when there is nothing else to do. You have made it into the Egyptian Paradise.
The ending of The King’s Speech was completely over the top. There was the king, George VI, played by Colin Firth, delivering the most important broadcast of his life to the nation and the empire beyond. It’s Sunday, 3 September, 1939; it’s the day Britain declared war on Germany; it’s the day the king walked with destiny.
The nation needed to hear the voice of the king, needed comfort and reassurance. George, who suffered from a debilitating speech defect from early childhood, begins hesitantly, but conducted – literally – by Philip Logue, a speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush, he makes his way steadily towards the end, all against a background of Beethoven. Among the palace audience, Elizabeth, the queen consort, played by Helena Bonham-Carter, was in tears, a moment of shared emotion, for I, too, was in tears! It was beautifully over the top.
The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper, is the kind of historical and personal drama that I love, full of nicely observed details. There are really two stories at work; one telling of the relationship between George and Logue, the other that of the relationship between the stuttering prince and the rest of the royal family, the firm, where he is known as Bertie.
There are some superb supporting roles. Michael Gambon is first class as George V, Bertie’s father, a bullying martinet, and Guy Pearce as David, the future King Edward VIII, a contrast in every way to his shy and diffident brother. Derek Jacobi gives good value as Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, at once imperious and subservient, and Timothy Spall does his best as Winston Churchill. Spall is a good performer but I seriously doubt that any actor, even the best, can depict Churchill without descending into caricature, amusing and absurd at one and the same time.
If you care about this sort of thing there are some serious historical inaccuracies in the movie, the most obvious of which is the depiction of Churchill as a confidant of Bertie’s during the Abdication Crisis, when Edward, who had since succeeded his father, is obliged to give up the throne because of his insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, played here by Eve Best. In fact Churchill was one of the most prominent members of the ‘King’s Party’, Wallis or not, in what must count as arguably the greatest political error of his career.
Still, don’t let this quibble detract from a hugely enjoyable film, a hugely impressive performance by Colin Firth, masterful as always, an utterly convincing stammerer. He shows Bertie as a vulnerable human being, painfully aware of his disability and yet immersed in notions of etiquette and the stiffest forms of protocol that only served to compound the problem.
The thing is, you see, Bertie is a product, a product of his upbringing. Though born left-handed he was made to use his right, one of the causes, supposedly, of childhood stutters. Overawed by his formidable father and mocked by his rather obnoxious brother, his verbal constipation is an expression of the constipation of his personality. It might not have mattered – after all he was only the spare, not the heir – but, as daddy says, the days when all a royal had to do was look good on a horse are over; now they have to speak to the masses. The movie opens with Bertie, then duke of York, giving a speech, sorry, that should be not giving a speech, on behalf of the king at the close of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925, clearly an occasion of deep humiliation for him and acute embarrassment for the audience.
Something has to be done, but what? Various methods are tried, including stuffing the poor chap’s mouth with marbles then asking him to read, or the king shouting at him “Get it out, boy!” As a last resort the duchess of York learns of a specialist based in Harley Street who comes recommended. I loved Helena Bonham-Carter in the part, at once puckish and condescendingly snobbish. But Logue – a super performance by Geoffrey Rush – is having none of it. A blunt Ozzie and something of a performer – as it turns out he is a failed actor – he won’t go to the mountain; the mountain must come to him. Bertie, with some reluctance, leaves the cocoon of the palace and comes to Logue’s shabby office. After a start as hesitant as his speech the two men strike up a rapport. This is not the end; it’s not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
Logue achieves two things; he begins to break the duke’s verbal logjam by breaking the logjam of his personality. Cutting through all protocol, he insists on calling Bertie Bertie, though nobody outside the firm has ever dared address him in such informal terms. As the therapy proceeds the two men strike up a kind of friendship, the first the duke has ever had, certainly with a commoner.
As he relaxes his speech also relaxes. But then the real crisis comes: Mrs Simpson comes. Edward, now on the throne, and frustrated in his desire to marry his American mistress, intends to abdicate. Bertie is no longer the spare; he is the man who will be king, like it or not; he will be George VI.
He doesn’t like it; he panics, fearful that he will go down in history as Mad King George the Stammerer, an echo of his ancestor Mad King George the Third. But Logue, rejected at one point for his personal and political importunities, continues to be on hand, seeing his friend through the coronation, despite the resentment of the establishment, most established in Archbishop Lang, and beyond, to that final moment of destiny on the first day of war.
This movie will last, well placed in the stable of royal thoroughbreds along with Mrs Brown, Young Victoria, The Madness of King George and The Queen. It’s a good story well told, well directed and superbly acted. It’s also a movie for the modern age, an age which does not really approve of stuffy royals and court protocol (the relationship with the real Logue was much more formal than the movie suggests). It’s a movie that humanises royalty, one that makes George just another chap, worthy of majesty once he is worthy to be a man.
What infinite heart's-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? what are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth! What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd Than they in fearing. What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Sorry about the alarmist headline, inspired by a snippet of information on disinformation in one of my history periodicals. Seemingly in 1934 the rumour spread that the Chesterfield Cigarette Company, based in Richmond, Virginia, had employed a leper to pack their product. A little like the famous Orson Well’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, the story caused a wave of panic, seriously impacting on Chesterfield sales.
Ligget and Myers, the tobacco company that owned the Chesterfield factory, issued official denials, but presumably on the basis of ‘they would, wouldn’t they’ the public was not reassured. Even the added support of the Board of Health (think of the irony here!) and the mayor of Richmond made little difference. A business rival was suspected; the company even offered a $25000 reward if the source of the rumour could be traced, but no definite evidence was ever forthcoming. As it was it took fully ten years for sales to recover.
I’ve done a spot of internet research on this subject and it seems that the bizarre association between leprosy and tobacco predates the Chesterfield panic by decades. In 1882 the Chester Times, a newspaper based in Pennsylvania, published the following alarming notice;
A physician who has studied the disease says that it is dangerous to assume that it can only be contracted by actual contact. The very atmosphere in which a leper moves is contaminated. It can be caught by using a chair or room which has been occupied by one afflicted with the disease, or by using a drinking vessel or anything that has been touched by a leper. The street cars are a prolific source of the contagion. Lepers are employed in the cheap cigar and cigarette shops, and scores of instances of the disease are known to have arisen from smoking the articles made by their plague-stricken fingers.
Now if that does not stop you smoking absolutely nothing will!
The association between leprosy and smoking continued to surface from time to time, even as late as the Vietnam War, when it was alleged that the marijuana cigarettes, freely available in Saigon and widely smoked by American soldiers, were made in a leper colony. This came with lurid added detail: that the individual lepers took part in the production process according to their disabilities, with the sickest of all licking the wrappers which sealed the joints! This was so gothically over the top that many solders suspected that it had been started by the Pentagon as part of an anti-drugs campaign, a fair deduction, I would have thought.
Rumour has long had power in human affairs which the advent of modern multi-media has done nothing to reduce. If anything the reverse is true, especially when it is combined with a growing X-files distrust of government and official sources of information. In the 1980s, to take but one example, a story emerged that Procter and Gamble, the American multi-national, was associated with Satanism, all on the basis of its moon and stars logo. In this case the rumour was eventually linked to a business rival, Amway, a direct selling company, resulting in a series of law suits, the most recent in 2007.
In the days before modern media hearsay was often the only way in which news spread. After the onset of the English Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII, a sensitive and dangerous time both politically and socially, the government had one blunt tool against the spread of damaging rumours – it traced them back to source. Those caught repeating a story were forced, under threat of dire penalties, to reveal who exactly they had heard it from, and so on and so on until the original malefactor was pinned down, presumably someone totally devoid of imagination or the wit to blame some passing tinker!
I’ve been busy catching up with some of the things I’ve missed over the New Year break. My people have been jolly decent, compiling a little archive of clippings, news items that they knew I would be interested in. One of the more important is information about Baroness Thatcher’s period in government, all contained in official papers released under the thirty year rule by the National Archive at the end of December.
There are really no great surprises, I suppose. Opposition to her economic policies came as much from within her own ranks as without. The most revealing document is a wittering eleven page memorandum – lecture might be a better word- from Harold Macmillan, a former prime minister whose antediluvian politics might best be described as old fashioned Tory guilt, warning that her tough stand on monetary policy – this was a time when inflation was running in double figures – would lead to a “constant recession.” He goes on to berate her for abandoning “consensus politics”, in other words the lazy thinking that had done so much to undermine this country since 1945. Her actions, as he saw it, were “against the essence of Tory democracy.”
The best riposte to this silly meandering came years later when Baroness Thatcher published her post-premiership memoirs. “What great cause”, she asked, “would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” Indeed. But Macmillan, though doddering and long out of power, was still an influential figure within the Conservative Party, which made her task all the harder, opposition to change coming even from within the government itself from an intellectually impotent old guard.
It has to be a matter of some celebration that she was neither Macmillan nor Heath, his unhappy protégé; she knew what was necessary and had enough Churchillian courage to proceed regardless. Within a few years inflation had come down from twenty-seven to four per cent, putting the country on the path of sustained economic recovery, not artificially fuelled by taxation and public spending of the Macmillan variety. The lady truly was not for turning.
The documents also reveal her admiration for President Reagan, written off in 1980 as stupid by so many of her advisors. Within a few years he was to show himself a figure of commanding political stature, in my estimation one of the great presidents, standing even among the greatest. The partnership between the President and the Premier was in large measure responsible for the spring time of the people, a revolution that swept communism away from Eastern Europe. In the end that will surely stand as the greatest achievement of all.
A few days before Christmas the BBC broadcast Taking Sides, a movie based on a play of the same name by Ronald Harwood. Directed by István Szabó, it’s based on the post-war interrogation of Wilhelm Furtwängler, best known as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, part of the denazification process instituted by the Allies in the wake of their victory over the Third Reich.
Furtwängler himself is played by Stellan Skarsgård, with Harvey Keitel taking on the role of Major Steve Arnold, his US Army inquisitor. In the minor key it’s about the clash between two contrasting personalities; in the major it explores the relationship between art and politics or, better said, the artist and politics. It’s also about taking sides.
It made me take sides, but not quite in the way that I expected. Szabó has previously explored the relationship between artistic integrity and moral corruption in Mephisto, a clever movie full of subtle ambiguity. I found Taking Sides to be neither subtle nor ambiguous. Whether it was the director’s intention or not, my sympathies were all with Furtwängler, a controlled performance by Skarsgård, confronted by an interrogator who turned out to be a spiteful and petty-minded philistine.
There is a message here, certainly, though I can’t be quite sure what the message was. At one point it even appeared to suggest that the art itself was corrupt, that the high culture of Beethoven and Schubert was evidence of corruption, listened to in docile silence by the Germans, cut and contrasted with American army personnel jitterbugging to a band performing Route 66.
Furtwängler essentially stood condemned by one thing: he stayed when so many others left. Not only did he stay in 33 but he became one of the prize trophies of the Nazi Regime, Hitler’s favourite ‘band leader’, as Major Arnold puts it, a monolith in what had been turned into a cultural desert. Many of those who did leave, particularly Thomas Mann, never forgave the conductor for his ‘apostasy’. Furtwängler’s defence, one that he offers to Arnold, was that he believed it possible to separate art from politics and – just as important – he could not abandon his country in the midst of spiritual darkness.
He was naïve, yes, but was he culpable? After all, he did not have the perfect knowledge of 1945, the knowledge of men like Arnold, whose self-righteous indignation is given added fire by footage of bodies being bulldozed into burial pits at Belsen Concentration Camp. Arnold, who previously announced that “I’m gonna get that fucking bandleader”, proceeds to try to pin him down as an active Nazi collaborator, though all the evidence is to the contrary: he may have performed for the regime but he kept his distance, never joining the Party, never giving the Hitler salute, helping Jewish musicians as he was able.
There is a germ of a first class idea here, effectively ruined by Keitel’s bombastic performance. I have no idea if this is a true representation of the real Major Arnold, but in the movie he’s depicted as a loud-mouthed bully, one whose petty humiliations of Furtwängler, looking ever more vulnerable, even alienates his assistant, a young Jewish lieutenant, and his German typist, herself a victim of the regime. Keitel’s Major Arnold, no matter how well-intentioned his motives, no matter how justified he is in his contempt for the morally blind, is no more than a self-important and abusive little philistine. He is no more, to put it another way, than a Nazi.
Although Furtwängler was finally exonerated of all ‘charges’ against him by a later denazification trial the movie ends with a voice-over by Arnold, saying that he had ‘winged’ him and that he was never allowed to conduct in the United States. But then, over the closing credits, footage of the real Furtwängler is shown, performing to an audience which includes Joseph Goebbels. At the conclusion the Propaganda Minister shakes his hand. The conductor is then shown surreptitiously wiping that same hand with a cloth.
I think I should finish with the testimony that he himself gave when he was examined by a German court, words I imagine beyond the comprehension of Major Arnold and all who walk in his shadow;
I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like.
Does Thomas Mann really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them.
Hi, I'm Ana! History is my passion -and that is not too strong a word - but I also enjoy politics, philosophy, art, literature and travel. In addition I have a deep interest in witchcraft, in all of the ancient arts. Apart from that I'm a keen sportswoman. I play lacrosse and tennis, but I love riding most of all. I have my own horse, Annette.
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