When Powell Met Sellers

 One of the regular treats of my boyhood was going to see the latest Peter Sellers film as it came out. My father was a huge fan, and so was I, right from the get-go. I remember seeing a string of wonderful comedies – I'm All Right Jack, Two Way Stretch, The Wrong Arm of the Law, Heavens Above!, Dr Strangelove, the early Pink Panther movies – in big, packed, smoke-wreathed cinemas. Lolita (he was Clare Quilty) and Being There (perhaps his masterpiece) came later. I was fascinated by the staggeringly gifted Sellers, and have remained intrigued by what I knew of his strange, complex personality – and by the fact that, for all his talent, he made so few really good films, and some insufferable ones. For some while I've been meaning to read Roger Lewis's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which has a reputation as a masterpiece of is genre. I loved Lewis's biog of Charles Hawtrey, and whatever else of his I've come across – including his bracingly honest 'Books of the Year' – so what was I waiting for? I took the plunge and ordered The Life and Death online. 
   When it arrived, I was startled to discover that it is a 900-plus-page doorstop of a book. For a slow reader like me, such size is daunting. Would it be worth pursuing Sellers through so many pages? So far, the answer seems to be a definite yes. I'm learning a great deal about Sellers: I never knew he was Jewish (weirdly, his various wives and lovers disagree about whether he was circumcised – the kind of detail only Lewis would tease out), and I never knew he was, in a sense, a 'replacement' for a stillborn brother called Peter – the kind of start in life that, if accompanied by doting, smothering mother love (as it was with Sellers), can lead to greatness, or madness, or both. Lewis is digressive, sprightly, effortlessly allusive, a ferociously diligent reseacher, always readable, and often very funny. I think I might make it through all 900-plus pages, but I'll be taking it in digestible chunks. 
   Here is a story Lewis tells in the Introduction. The great director Michael Powell had acquired the film rights to Michael Frayn's The Russian Interpreter, and Sellers had expressed an interest, so Powell and Frayn went to see him at his mock-Tudor Surrey mansion. Powell turned up dressed in Edwardian motoring gear, complete with goggles, driving a Rolls Bentley and poop-pooping like Mr Toad. He drove straight into Sellers's personal garage, and inquired imperiously of what he took to be a ten-year-old girl, 'Is this Sellers'?' The girl was Britt Ekland. Sellers took an instant loathing to Powell, a man as 'very horribly full of himself' as he was, and began to plot his revenge. He became taciturn and withdrawn, barely joining in the discussion, and acting vague and bewildered when the matter of a contract was raised. By this point, 'it was slowly dawning in a corner of [Powell's] mind just what degree of deliberate objectionableness he might be up against'. 
   A little later, they all met up again in a suite at the Dorchester. Sellers had set the stage perfectly. He had installed his own piped music system, which he refused to turn off. He had surrounded himself with a small army of lawyers and agents, while Britt, reclining on a sofa, had an animated conversation with various Swedish relatives throughout. 'Was a food-checker there, too,' wonders Lewis, 'to check Sellers' grub for poison? Nubians waving ostrich plume fans? People practising Elizabethan dance steps to a viola da gamba?' After Powell had gone on a bit about how he envisaged his film, Sellers said, 'How about John Schlesinger to direct? Clive Donner?' A stunned silence fell. 'Powell was startled,' writes Lewis. 'Wasn't the famous director of The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death there before his eyes? "Rather than bringing in a new voice at this stage," said Powell, trying to pretend Sellers was making light, "I propose to direct the film myself." 
  "No, no, Michael, I wouldn't agree to that... I wouldn't approve that. It's not your subject."
  Powell went home and recorded one word, 'Peterloo', in his diary – he had been massacred, in full public view.' 

'But o, photography!...'

 Today is the birthday of Samuel Johnson (born 1709). Over on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp marks the occasion with a piece on various translations of one of Johnson's Latin verses, a memory of swimming in the waters of Stowe Pool in Lichfield, a 'meditation on memory, time's bittersweet passing, and lost youth'. The waters of Stowe no longer flow through green fields, and the Pool, an impressive body of water containing some fine fish, many an American crayfish and a terrapin called Terry, has something of the look of a reservoir (which it has been in its time). Lichfield will be celebrating Johnson's birthday – and the 125th anniversary of the opening of the birthplace museum – tomorrow. 
   On this day in 1953, Philip Larkin wrote (or signed off on) 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', which is also, in its way, a meditation on memory and time's bittersweet passing – and the nature of photography. Like so many of Larkin's poems, it ends beautifully. 

At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose —
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) —
From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,

But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

T-Shirt Day

 Radio 3 this morning was getting very excited about Radio  6 Music's T-Shirt Day (not to be confused with International T-Shirt Day or National T-Shirt Day – heaven knows what thrills await us on those dates). This is the kind of thing that tends to happen on the once sedate Radio 3 (what would Piers Burton-Page say?), and I guess it's the price we pay for keeping the network afloat, with enough listeners to justify its existence. It still plays much high-quality music, and heaven knows, it is preferable in every way to Radio 4, at least as default listening. 
  Here in Lichfield, every day is T-Shirt Day: the T-shirt seems to be the preferred apparel of every generation. Most Ts celebrate bands, with a bias in favour of heavy metal – this is the West Midlands, after all – but some sport mottoes or jokes. Alas, I've yet to see a Samuel Johnson T-shirt... The best I've spotted recently I caught sight of from the window of an optician's yesterday, as I was surveying the passing scene (I had no book with me). It was this (though in a more suitable Communist red) and it made me laugh...

The face of Alfred E. Neuman slapped onto the iconic photo of the popular psychopath Che Guevara, it originated in a famous Mad magazine cover ('Viva la Supidity!'). 

  One day, I was walking along Lichfield's Market Street when I saw, approaching me, a large middle-aged man stripped to the waist, showing off a mighty beer belly topped by hairy man breasts. This kind of thing can happen when the weather gets hot. However, as he passed me, I realised that he was in fact wearing a T-shirt – a T-shirt displaying a hyperrealistic image of what no doubt lay beneath. I was at once relieved and, almost, impressed to discover this. For myself, I never wear T-shirts these days (except as a vest substitute), but in my imbecilic youth I owned, among others, a Karl Marx T-shirt – not, alas, adorned with the feature of Alfred E. Neuman. 

'His irritable, captious love'

 Here are the 'always excellent Dick Davis' and the 'right decent geezer' Samuel Johnson back already. Davis is writing (to fellow poet R.L. Barth) about Johnson's Lives of the Poets – and about Johnson the man...

With Johnson's Lives of the Poets

He wrote these quick biographies
To be instructive and to please;
      In them we find

Among judicious anecdotes
The apt quotation that denotes
      A taste defined

And wrested from this record of
His irritable, captious love
      For failed mankind –

From fear, from his compassion for
Insanity, the abject poor,
      The world's maligned.

He laboured to be just, and where
Justice eluded him his care
      Was to be kind.

Read generously – as once he read
The words of the indifferent dead.
     Enter his mind. 

Nonsense upon Stilts

 'Natural rights is simple nonsense,' declared Jeremy Bentham: 'natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.' He was right: rights are not 'natural', they are prescribed, i.e. created, by human societies (those human societies that like the idea). The notion of 'natural rights' is simply a carry-over from 'natural theology'.
  Unfortunately, the general idea of rights has proved highly seductive, at the expense of its proper concomitant, duties. Most rights would be better framed as duties: our duties towards our fellow humans – or, indeed, animals, who are now seen as having 'rights' of their own. But it gets worse: trees now have 'rights' too. Believe it or not, there exists a Universal Declaration of Tree Rights – it seems you don't even need a pulse or a central nervous system to have rights now. Mercifully, the Declaration does not confer 'legal personhood' on trees, which must surely mean that these 'rights' are not legal but 'natural'. They are indeed 'nonsense upon stilts'.
   As such, they have of course proved attractive to certain flaky councillors in such redoubts of New Age thinking as Lewes in Sussex, which has just become the first English town to recognise trees' 'right to flourish and to maintain their natural life cycles, ecological functions and evolutionary processes' across the whole town. I suppose it will do no harm... Anyway, I am irresistibly reminded of this poem, by George Pope Morris: 

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
    Thy axe shall harm it not!

That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o'er land and sea,
And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth-bound ties;
O, spare that aged oak,
    Now towering to the skies!

When but an idle boy
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here too my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand —
Forgive this foolish tear,
    But let that old oak stand!

My heart-strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I've a hand to save,
Thy axe shall hurt it not. 

A Wreath of Roses

 Having spent too long reading little but non-fiction (much of it for review), I turned back to fiction recently, reading A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, recommended and lent to me by my cousin. I had read a few Taylors, including what is surely her masterpiece, Angel, and was happy to discover more. 
  Published in 1949 as Taylor's fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses opens promisingly, with a shocking event (no spoilers) at a sleepy provincial railway station, witnessed by Camilla, a woman on the brink of middle age who has led a quiet, even prim life and is on her way to her annual holiday. All is about to change for Camilla when she meets a conventionally handsome, self-assured man who calls himself Richard Elton. He is exactly the kind of man she is not usually attracted to, and it is soon clear that he is a liar and a fraud – and yet, even when she knows this, she cannot help being drawn into an affair that she sees as her last chance of romance before life closes over her. Gradually, she discovers that Richard has far worse things  to hide than a bogus war record...
  At the beginning of the story, Camilla is on her way to stay, as she has done every summer for years, with her best friend Liz, in the cottage of their older friend, Frances, a painter. These summers have always been idyllic, at least in retrospect, but this year everything has changed: Liz is now married to a rather tiresome vicar and her time is taken up with her baby, Harry, while the aging Frances is facing a crisis in her art and her life. At first I found these characters and their situation rather cold and uninvolving – and it has to be said that the baby Harry and Frances's dog, Hotchkiss, are two of the least attractive of their kind in fiction. However, the Camilla-Richard storyline was enough to keep me reading – and I'm glad I did, as everything comes to life at the halfway point with the arrival of Morland Beddoes, the man who has been buying Frances's paintings (and loving her at a distance) for years. This fascinating, deeply sympathetic character brings warmth and heart to the milieu, and is central to driving the action to its dramatic climax. Described as 'Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel', A Wreath of Roses lives up to the billing, but is crafted with such quiet, elegant expertise that one hardly notices how clever – and how dark – it is. 

  

A Bit of Paternity

 Time for a poem. 
   Here is one by the always excellent Dick Davis, about a situation every parent – and grandparent – will be familiar with: the awful helplessness we feel in the presence of a child inconsolably, unreachably upset or hurt...

A Bit of Paternity

To tell your weeping child,
'This too will pass, believe
Me, I've been here before'

Is to be one who walks
Communing with himself
Along a wintry shore

And thinks his murmured thoughts
Might calm the crashing waves,
The wind's inhuman roar.