Suspension of service

The Grievous Angel blog is going into a period of reconstruction. Apologies for the interruption of service.

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters is a biography of a psychotic young homeless man in Cambridge.

I'd just finished the book when I heard an item on Today this morning about biographies of ordinary folk. Blake Morrison argued that documenting the lives of ordinary people was at least as important as biographies of famous people. Given the celebrity-obsessed nature of our times, he argued, recording the lives of ordinary people was one of the few ways left to us to help us understand the texture of our daily lives.

Reading Stuart, I completely appreciate what he means. Not that Stuart Shorter, for a moment, is ordinary. Life has dealt him an extraordinarily bad hand. But he has the articulacy and detachment to analyse and elucidate his situation with objectivity.

The book is presented, in part, as a conversation between Stuart and his biographer - who shares with us the maddening frustration of trying to structure the incomprehensible and seemingly irrational world of the drug-addicted homeless into a compelling narrative. Stuart's reality is so far removed from Masters' - and our own - that his story is irritatingly repellant at first. Why does he keep landing himself in prison, resorting to violence, turning those who try to help him against him?

But slowly, Masters makes sense of it - and leaves you slightly shameful for your earlier exasperation.

The master-stroke in the narrative is actually Stuart's idea. He doesn't like Masters' initial manuscript. He finds it boring and wants something people will actually read "like what Tom Clancy writes". It's Stuart who suggests that Masters should write the life backwards:

"Do it the other way round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was?"

The boy he was - though suffering from muscular dystrophy - was optimistic, bright and conscientious. He dies in his thirties, having held a knife to his young son's throat and threatened to kill him, served several prison sentences, and dragged himself out of chaos to hold down a relatively normal life. The descent starts around the age of 12 when he is sexually abused repeatedly by his brother and babysitter. He gets himself put into care, where he is abused further at the hands of his protectors. He discovers violence as a means to make people respect him.

There is so much insight in this book into aspects of Britain that we probably would rather not know that it's painful to read.

There's the irrationality of the welfare system for the homeless - where people who devote their lives to helping the dispossesed are jailed for allowing drug dealing in their hostel, when they can't get the police to tackle the problem.

There's the mad logic of prison life - where if someone tries to bully you, you attack him no matter how big he is. Because if you don't you'll be his victim for ever.

And there's the distressing silence around sexual violence. Stuart and his sister were both abused by their brother. But neither could speak about it until years later. In care, Stuart would run away from his children's home - only to be found by the police and delivered back to his abusers. One, a respected childcare expert called Keith Laverack, was later found guilty of eleven counts of buggery and four of indecent assault against girls and boys - thought to be the tip of the iceberg of his crimes.

One night, Masters does an audit of the homeless in Cambridge to disprove the local council's assertion that only eleven people are sleeping rough in the city. He trebles the figure with little difficulty. And, again, he experiences a subculture which operates to different rhythms than our own. He comes across a group of homeless people in a bus station. Violence flares up among them suddenly, but ebbs away mysteriously with no apparent resolution.

I'm left wondering how it is possible to live in a country, and yet not know it. How is it that the media, on which I rely to make sense of what is going on, somehow fails to detect - let alone explain - the impoverishment of spirit that exists under our noses? Alexander Masters shows it's not hard to find. Not that I imagine his task was easy. His book on Stuart evidently took years to research and write. But he demonstrates that if you're prepared to look and listen - and comprehend - a different truth is out there.

Not that it's all doom and gloom. There's plenty of humour - Masters' tacit envy when he grasps that Stuart is a dab hand at the TV interview, and blasé with it. He's been doing them most of his life - "It's only television".

And then there's the way Masters has turned around Stuart's perception of the middle class:

"I thought middle-class people had something wrong with them. But they're just ordinary. I was a bit shocked, to tell the truth."

And that's the gift of the biography of ordinary folk. It's not about elevating the familiar into something special. In fact, it takes something that is strange - but shouldn't be strange - and makes it ordinary nonetheless. Ordinary in the sense that it is now more easily understood.

See also:
Normblog

Surnames

The most interesting thing I read in the papers today was this short item in the Observer about research into the distribution of surnames in the UK.

The Spatial Literacy at University College London has put its surname profiler on its website. The profiler lets you see where different surnames are concentrated around the country.

It provides an entertaining diversion for a few minutes.

Don't come Bach for a while

Radio 3's Bach festival - every note of Bach, non-stop in the 10 days leading up to Christmas - appears to have made a resounding impression on the listening public.

According to The Guardian, the website devoted to the season received 5.5m page impressions and 7,000 postings to the Bach messageboard. These stats are taken as an indication of good listening figures, which apparently won't be available.

The Bach-fest also had an impact in the shops:

Tony Shaw, buyer of classical music for the chain HMV, said Bach sales had doubled. "People say that classical music is dying, but when it is featured heavily on TV or radio there is a huge response," he said.

I find this all a little bemusing. I was drawn to the Bach festival - not out of a great enthusiasm for Bach, rather to grasp an opportunity to become more familiar with his work. I was also pleased to know that I could turn on the radio and be sure to find something worth my attention.

In the end, though, I developed an allergy to Johann Sebastian. Mrs Angel got there before me, driven to distraction by the repetitiveness of what we heard. Not for us, the awe at the transcedant quality of his music nor the appreciation of the contrapuntal intricacy expressed by various commentators at the start of the fest.

There were highlights - including Glenn Gould's two interpretations of the Goldberg Variations recorded thirty years apart. But for so much of it, the solemn churchiness was just too much of a stumbling block. And this is where the 10-day concentration didn't work for me. I can delight in the cantatas individually. But day after day, the insistent assertion of ecclesiastic ritual - far from creating meaning beyond itself - kept pushing me away.

Brian Micklethwait has also picked up on the overwhelming religiosity of Bach and identifies perhaps why it should be disturbing:

I realise that this is a very obvious thing to be noticing. But hearing cantata after cantata introduced with its German wording, and then being told in English what it all means and why the contralto aria in particular is so deeply felt and beautiful and then what the chorus will be singing about at the end, has connected all this music to religion in a way that I have preferred to – not ignore exactly – just not pay all that much attention to. Of course I know what the St Matthew Passion is about, but for me the harmonies and melodies are the reason for listening. The religion of it is, for me, merely the platform Bach used to build the thing, even as I am aware that for Bach religion was the point. Bach also wrote a lot of purely instrumental music, such as the Brandenberg Concertos, the violin and the keyboard concertos, and the solo works for violin, for cello and for keyboard, and of course I cannot get enough of those.

But if you want to understand Johann Sebastian Bach, as opposed merely to enjoying him, you cannot ignore religion. Here is yet another historical circumstance which twentieth century atheists like me are now able to understand that little bit better, now that once again we have in our midst people who really believe in this kind of stuff, and who believe in combining their beliefs with the exercise of secular power, in ways that Christians mostly now do not. Listening at around midnight, early on in the proceedings, to one march-like tune from a cantata, and remembering what the announcer had just said that it was about, I suddenly felt scared. My God, I am being attacked by an army of True Believers. In short, I got the message.

So did I. Hold the Matthew Passion for a while. I'll stick with the secular Bach of the Cello Suites and the joyous Brandenburg Concertos.

Fulsome

"Fulsome" does not mean "generous" nor even "expansive". It means "cloying" or "excessive".

The readers' editor of The Guardian thinks the battle for correct usage is very nearly lost.

He may be right. Google turns up copious transgressions from not just The Guardian, but also BBC News, The Telegraph and The Economist.

Who wrote Shakespeare?

BBC4 re-ran this week the film Much Ado About Something by the Australian director, Mike Rubbo. This revisits the question of whether the man who was William Shakespeare actually wrote the Shakespeare canon. Rubbo's film puts the case for Christopher Marlowe.

And surprisingly plausible it is too.

The case against Shakespeare is intriguing. Aside from the canon, he left behind next to no artifacts of a cultural life. Apparently, he possessed no books; his daughters were illiterate; his will speaks of the estate of a successful merchant rather than of a writer. The only samples of his writing are six signatures, some of which suggest he had difficulty writing. As a busy actor and theatre manager, he would have had no time to write except in the pub by candlelight in the evening. This would have been arduous and unrewarding. In such circumstances, he might have been expected to draft the bare minimum necessary. Yet the unedited Shakespeare manuscripts run to four-hours in performance - far exceeding the requirements of the stage.

Rubbo tracks down the advocates of Marlowe who have a conspiracy theory befitting the murky Elizabethan age. Marlowe was an intellectual, homosexual and a freethinker - a cocktail which attracted the disapprobation of the ecclesiastical authorities. He was the most successful playwright of his age. But his time was up. He was under investigation and was to be taken before the Star Chamber - which would inevitably mean torture, trial and death.

However, because he was also a spy who had delivered loyal service to the queen, he had connections - who had form in springing him from tricky situations. Rubbo suggests that far from being murdered in a bar-room brawl in Deptford, Marlowe - with the connivance of his patrons - faked his own death and went into exile in Europe. The queen even helped with the cover up.

Marlowe's death/disappearance coincides with Shakespeare's emergence as a writer. The Shakespeare plays display knowledge and learning of a life on the Continent and of royal courts (to which Marlowe was exposed as a spy). They contain references to the locations of Marlowe's life and none to Shakespeare's Warwickshire. Exile, loss and longing are constant themes. Rubbo suggests that Marlowe found sanctuary with a family in northern Italy and sent back the works from there. Shakespeare was his front man, and a good deal of literary London was in on the secret.

As Gavin McNett - who wrote about Much Ado About Something when it was first released - observes:

Rubbo's film shows that Her Majesty's Secret Service (the original, Elizabeth I version) might have been involved in the Shakespeare thing up to their Elizabethan ruffs. While "Much Ado About Something" begins by showing the Marlovians as harmless eccentrics, mostly of the English Miss Marple and Colonel Mustard variety, it also shows them as holding that rarest of patents in the conspiracy-buff field -- an idea that keeps looking more compelling the further you get into it.

And it may get more compelling still. McNett speaks of references to Marlowe in diplomatic records after the date of the Deptford brawl. Rubbo believes there may be conclusive evidence of Marlowe's exile to be found in the archives of the family in Italy who are said to have sheltered him. Apparently, no-one has investigated these yet.

There may never be proof that Marlowe wrote the Shakespeare plays, but it my yet be established that he didn't die at that bar in Deptford.

Public service TV?

Channel 4's two-part documentary series Wanted: New Mum and Dad looked at adoption from the point of view of a number of children waiting to be matched with new parents.

The programmes were powerful and moving - showing the heartbreak of children removed from their birth parents, the route to healing that adoption offers, and dilemmas such as whether sibling groups are more likely to find adoptive parents if kept together or separated. One child - having gone through the agonising wait for a future family - suffered more trauma when her prospective adoption broke down.

The series has received positive reviews - for example, from The Guardian. But I was uncomfortable with it, because it struck me as exploitative of the children portrayed.

While the stories were sensitively presented, they were based on subjects who could not give informed consent to their participation. Television is not a neutral observer. In portraying people's lives, it changes them - as anyone who saw the recent 49 Up films by Michael Apted will have appreciated.

A good deal of what passes for public service television is really no more than producers intruding into people's intimacies for the gratification of audiences. Channel 4 is a master of the art. Mostly, it focusses on adults who - to a greater or lesser extent - understand what they are getting into.

Not this time. At least some of the children portrayed in Wanted: New Mum and Dad may rue the day that the cameras came to serve up their circumstances to the watching millions. By then, the producers of the programme may well have retired - perhaps having picked up a couple of BAFTAs along the way. Will they give a stuff?

What do you think?