You Don’t Speak Spanish, Do You?

Recently I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film The Limits of Control, an enigmatic, dream-like play on the adventure of a hitman. I liked it very much indeed. There are many allusions in the film – to John Boorman’s Point Blank, Jean- Pierre Melville films like Le Samourai and a lot more - and many jokes, such as the running matchbox McGuffin, where the main character – the Lone Man (none of the characters have a name) - receives a matchbox, reads the small note inside and then swallows it; at his next meeting he hands the empty box to the next person and receives another with a small note inside,
and so on. We never get to see the note, but he does get to throw away the last matchbox.

His recognition sign at the venue of each meeting is that he orders two small cups of espresso coffee; the password for the meeting is ‘Usted no habla español, ¿verdad?’ (see the title of this post).The shifts in the film are marked by the protagonist’s change of the colour of his clothes from one iridescent sharkskin suit to the next. There are three. One for Madrid, another for Seville and a third for the countryside, particularly Almeria.

But here I want to talk about one of the things that most struck me about the film: probably the best series of snapshots of Spain I have ever seen. It is pitch perfect - unsentimental, charming and accurate. In Madrid, Jarmusch uses the extraordinary Torres Blancas (White Towers, see first photo) by the architect Sáenz de Oiza, a block built in the late sixties of the so-called ‘organic’ school. The building is supposed to be some sort of socialised tree in reinforced concrete without pillars blocking the interior spaces. The problem is that the builder of the White Towers ran out of money before the white cladding could be put on. Age and traffic fumes have worked their dingy magic on the concrete so that it now resembles a tall cement factory, the kilns placed upright.

Another building Jarmusch uses in Madrid is the ‘Reina Sofia’ – the national art gallery containing works by Picasso and after. It is a restored and fairly austere palacio with modern adjuncts, now showing a little damp. Some of the paintings (Juan Gris, Tàpies) are apparently used to convey information to the protagonist.

His third main use of Madrid is a small square, which is even more restored now, but in the film is seen aspiring to the kind of public space folksiness municipalities everywhere favour. Naturally, there are some examples of graffiti on the walls.

The old quarter he uses in Seville is a marvel. Graffiti is everywhere and - one of the film’s best touches - so is the noise. I once read a report saying that, after Japan, Spain is the noisiest country in the world. If they say so. I’d say the Spanish are noisier. There is one scene where the protagonist lies down (he never sleeps), while the sounds of cooking, singing and speaking from the surrounding houses go on and on.

Then there are the images of the countryside. Several Spaniards have told me that Britain’s countryside is strange because it has no great stretches of land without people or with any sign of human influence. Parts of Spain are big enough and barren enough to show human activity simply as scars or stark impositions, and there are houses that look either abandoned or absurdly protected and small against the space around them.

And finally there is flamenco. Many years ago an old lady in Andalusia told me that she never heard flamenco as a child. It had risen ‘for the tourists’. White horses, black bulls, girls in Sevillana dresses, and flamenco. Tourist Board folklore. This is, of course, not entirely fair but I feel I have done my quota of listening to and seeing stamping feet and wailing voices.

Of course it depends who is performing.

One very old form of flamenco which is used in the film is the petenera – it is like ‘the Scottish Play’ of flamenco music, in that it is considered to bring bad luck. The password of Jim Jarmusch’s film, ‘Usted no habla español, ¿verdad?’ and the title of this, was apparently Mr Jarmusch’s case. But this is the flamenco form he asked for and got. It is quiet and beautifully done.

If you would like to listen to a version of it, you can click here. You will hear echoes of the 14^th century through the lute to La Celestina, the great novel by Fernando de Rojas.

As with the film, you will love it or hate it.

Amazon Is Not The ACME Corporation

From time to time, writers leave their books and indulge in, sometimes furiously one-sided, spats. Wordsworth’s poetic injunction – tranquility – disappears as fast as the Road Runner in Loony Tunes cartoons.

Sometimes the difficulties of the job, a writer’s reaction to a particular set of them and to his or her relations with the buying public (see sales) and other writers and critics, goes public and postal.

Recent examples include Alain de Botton who responded vehemently (“I will hate you until the day I die”) to the writer of a poor review of his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and Orlando Figes (a rather wider self-placement.)

Some simply do not transcend. I don’t remember seeing Donna Leon’s remarks on Stieg Larsson’s work in Santander last year making it into English at all. That may have been because she was being interviewed rather than writing for herself, and because she was not speaking in Spanish but being translated into Spanish.

Today, the Scotsman reports an apparent spat between someone using the name Philip Kerr and Allan Massie. Massie is a novelist and reviewer of many years’ experience. One Philip Kerr is well-known for his Bernie Gunther novels. Possibly another Philip Kerr took the time to write an Amazon review of 813 words lambasting Massie’s latest book, on the Stuarts.

Outsiders (Allan Massie himself is quoted as saying he is ‘amused’) are thus faced with one of two problems. The first is that the real Philip Kerr has had his name usurped. The second is that a professional writer has reviewed another professional writer on Amazon.

While Figes also used Amazon’s review service to decry people he considered as his rivals, this doesn’t seem to be the case here. The review, now withdrawn, specifically mentions what the reviewer considers to be unfavourable reviews by Allan Massie of the reviewer’s last two books.

Naturally, the Scotsman prints excerpts of those two reviews of novels. They suggest a falling off from earlier books. That’s Allan Massie’s opinion. In the not very widely read Scotsman.

Point? Irritation, annoyance and even hurt happen. But doing something about it has a habit of making the doer into the Coyote – a much loved cartoon character but one who relies too much on explosive products from the Acme Corporation, and invariably blows himself up. Nothing too grand. He survives.

Meep meep.

Ludwig & Norbert

Despite my intentions on April 29 (see previous post 'Northern Brightness') I have since succumbed, and read Sally’s in the Alley by Norbert Davis (The Rue Morgue Press). As I said then, apparently Wittgenstein was a fan of Norbert’s language, his humour, and his lack of sentimentality.

What this description doesn’t make clear is the extraordinary separation of the hard-boiled from the low-down in the book. According to Jack Adrian (pseudonym of Christopher Lowder), Norbert Davis’ “fatal flaw” was his ‘sense of humour’ - preventing him from being published more frequently.

That's not quite right. Sally’s in the Alley, at slightly short of forty thousand words, has a plot that is as consequential as that of an early Lubitsch film or even a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It also has farcical elements of the Wrong Box variety – bodies get moved around; there are a couple of set pieces – a chase through an old Hollywood film set and a flash flood in the desert; and there are some contemporary references to WW2 – Goering gets a going-over and Doan, the private eye, uses the alias I Doanwashi when pretending to be a Japanese spy. He also uses the name H. Pocus.

Far more time is spent on Carstairs - a sort of canine Jeeves of immense size and usefulness in a pinch - than on most of the human characters. I’d hesitate to call him a precursor of Brian in Family Guy, but there is something there of a conventional moral sense (the only character who has one in the book) having to come to terms with being a dog.

The attraction for Wittgenstein? For most people language meets mathematics in logic. Take this passage:

‘Start at a town called Heliotrope.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Either in California or Nevada.’
‘You said either?’ Doan asked.
‘Yes. The State of California is now suing the State of Nevada in the Supreme Court to compel Nevada to annex it. Nevada has started a countersuit to compel California to annex it.’
‘What’s the matter with the place?’
‘Just everything. ….’

I can see how such an exchange would appeal to someone who wrote ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.’

Though perhaps a better quote here from Wittgenstein, given what happens in Norbert’s story to Susan Sally (in a room, not in an alley) would be ‘Death is not an event in life.’

Tinned Pears

Two Saturdays ago, 1918 met 2009, when my father-in-law met his fifth great-grandchild again. The meeting was amiable and involved quite a lot of ‘and the little one said roll over, roll over’, and the very amusing sound/word ‘oink’.

I mention this because of a recent conversation I had with a reader on the term ‘historical novel’.

Throughout the history of the novel, any number of writers, Henry James, for example, have believed that it is not possible to write historical novels with any claim to honesty or real accuracy. How can you seriously do justice to the people who were alive then? Isn’t what a novelist is producing a more or less wistful twist on motives, mores and attitudes for modern tastes?

To some extent I agree. But I am, certainly in theory, comfortable with that. The novel has been going long enough for, say, historical novels of the 19th Century and later, to tell us something about the time in which they were written, as well as the time they describe.

My own confidence levels and my history are not up to portraying the eighteenth, let alone the fifteenth century. Why? As John Updike put it, nothing disappears faster than motive. I can admire Hilary Mantel, but I can’t emulate her.

In any case, as I told my reader, I am not sure I do write historical novels. Period pieces perhaps? No. I write about the ample edges of living memory, because I want to trace the progress of a lot of the attitudes towards Empire and World War 2 as they have come down to us and remain with us.

I suggested ‘generational novel’ as a substitute. No, it is not terribly good. But it is probably snappier, if less accurate, than ‘after effects novel’.

After the birth of his first great grandchild in 2002, my father-in–law was persuaded by the baby’s father, my nephew, to write down some of his experiences in WW2. He did this in ‘real’ time. That is, he wrote down, day by matching day, what he had been doing in Burma in 1942, sixty years earlier. I haven’t read this account, which was kept safely for great-grandchild number one to read in the future, but I do know he walked about six hundred miles, cannot bear the smell of tinned pears – too reminiscent of the smell of dead refugee bodies –and that the account ended when he could no longer remember because he had contracted malaria and pneumonia. When they weighed him, after being carried by stretcher for the last part back to India, he was six stone. The doctors told him he should not look forward to a long life.

Let me put it this way. Every time I hear someone explain that something awful happened a long time ago, in 2003 or 2006, but things are now different, I think of pears in tins.

It may be – I don’t know – that the recent elections mean that the UK is finally coming to terms with a new role in the world, less imperial in both money and lives. It is certainly time.

Northern Brightness

Among the delights of research are the incidental finds. Washington Shadow is set in 1945, at a time when John Maynard Keynes was in Washington trying to raise a loan to keep the British economy afloat after the end of Lend-Lease.

This is a quote from the philosopher Wittgenstein. ‘The one way in which the ending of Lend-lease really limits me is by producing a shortage of detective mags in this country. I can only hope Lord Keynes will make this quite clear in Washington’.

Now I already knew that his friend Bertrand Russell (he talked to Wittgenstein when Ludwig was doubting between aeronautics and philosophy) was a fan of murder stories – he claimed they helped him avoid committing his own – but I had missed Wittgenstein’s taste for hard-boiled fiction.

That is hard-boiled. Though he could praise Agatha Christie, Wittgenstein refused to read of a Catholic priest detective – Chesterton’s Father Brown. He wanted pulp fiction.
I was brought up with an appreciation for the American taste for witty lyrics (Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and so on) , the Marx Brothers films, writers like S J Perlman, Damon Runyon and, of course, Hammett, Horace McCoy and James M Cain; I read a lot of these in the early eighties.

But I now have to confess that I missed the writer Wittgenstein liked most, Norbert Davis. Norbert apparently means Northern brightness, and was a break from the family tradition of Robert – the family were distantly related to Robert Burns. He did not live long. Diagnosed with cancer, Norbert Davis committed suicide in 1949 at the age of forty.

Right now I am writing – I keep away from reading at this stage – but I am looking forward to meeting Norbert later this year in The Mouse in the Mountain, Sally’s in the Alley, and Oh, Murderer Mine . Apparently Wittgenstein admired his use of language, his humour and his lack of sentimentality.

Happy to hear from those who have read him.

Peter Cotton - Cadiz, Washington … and London

On Tuesday April 13, I signed a contract for another two Peter Cotton books with John Murray. Given that the verbal agreement dates back to January, I ignored any superstitious stuff (Martes Trece is the Spanish equivalent of Friday 13) and pressed ahead.

The two books are scheduled to be published around April 2011 and April 2012. There are some changes, most notably in length. I remember a previous post answering queries on how long my books were and saying I had been asked for seventy thousand words. The next two books will be longer - around a hundred thousand words.

I also mentioned having been asked if I was ever influenced by commercial pressures. Well, I am certainly influenced by the marketing department. In two ways. They wanted something ‘bigger’ and they thought that my original idea – of having Cotton properly start his colonial career in the next book (which would also have entailed jumping a few years) – was premature. I should stay closer to home for the moment.

This is by no means a complaint. In two days last October, I blocked out an entirely new book - one I would never have thought of but for the pressure and input I got from the publishers.

The next book, then - its working title is London Ice - takes place a year after Washington Shadow, during the very grim winter of 1946-47. It’s going well.

When The Third Man Met the Third Person

I have been asked, a lot, why I picked the surname Cotton for the protagonist of my novels. It is not a signally heroic sort of name. No Spade, Laidlaw or Reacher. Nor is it the obvious name of an anti-hero.

Perhaps I should have made things clearer, because people have also said – ah, you mean he ‘cottons on’? Actually no, I didn’t have catching on in mind. Others have mentioned one of Peter Rabbit’s siblings – Cottontail. Kindly, they don’t mention Flopsy. But again, Beatrix Potter, so admirable in so many other contexts, was not in my mind.

By far the most interesting and unexpected take has been, courtesy of Andrew, of the excellent Edinburgh Bookshop, who asked if the name was an allusion or tribute to the actor Joseph Cotten, described apparently by Orson Welles as ‘the perfect in-film narrator’ (meaning first, that Joseph Cotten could speak clearly; second, that his acting style, certainly for the forties, was naturalistic on film and third, that he provides the viewer’s ‘in’ and thread to the story).

Welles and Cotten acted together several times – sometimes with Welles as director - but, most notably in the 1949 film The Third Man, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed.

The short answer to Andrew’s question was no, there was certainly no conscious allusion – but it did set me thinking. I chose the surname Cotton because it seemed to me a good name for a third person narrative.

The Third Person 'he' or 'she' is less obviously subjective than First person 'I'. Yes, I am aware of Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa’s great film which appeared in 1950 - in which unreliable ‘I’ participant-witnesses put any sort of truth through self-interest and a prism.

But the kind of Third Person narrator that interested me can add a certain shadow (a little gleam as well) to objectivity, knowledge and selection. Graham Greene was one highly perceptive part of the cross-fertilisation between film and printed narrative.

To put Joseph Cotton’s character Holly Martins another way, the descendant of Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow, and F Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, meets Christopher Isherwood’s pre-war ‘I am a camera’ on film.

Greene even has an unreliable witness called Kurtz - surely a reference to Conrad’s character in A Heart of Darkness. In post-war Vienna, Holly Martins, a pulp fiction writer, learns that morals, a confident viewpoint and even friendship are as disposable as the children being given adulterated penicillin.

The Third Man has a highly atmospheric noir look and over the shoulder camera tilts and dislocating angles. Yes, I may, as a child, have been over-impressed by the Cheshire Cat, but Orson Welles makes inimitable use of a smile when taking half a step out of the dark. Lime light with a difference.

The actual Third Man refers to someone who may or may not have been present when Harry Lime was (as Holly Martins finds out at the beginning of the film) hit and killed by a truck. The thing is, of course, that Harry Lime was not killed and has gone to ground rather than being in a box under it. The Third Man is never seen, a sort of shadow of knowledge - in cooking terms a thickener of a sauce or a binding agent. He is a possibility, a possible lead, a growing suspicion.

Getting the effect of the Third Man into the Third Person is not at all easy and I have taken some comfort from discovering that Graham Greene’s initial treatment-cum-novella underwent several changes when it became film. Some were market based – Martins and Harry Lime became Americans. Likewise with name changes - Rollo to Holly Martins. Not the name of a hero. Perhaps what surprised me most was to learn that the director’s final cut was to have a grim ending to the relatively hopeful one Greene proposed.

Finally, just to put this in perspective, I remember that in Greene’s Collected Essays, he recorded Beatrix Potter’s reaction to a review of his on her work. The review was pretty favourable. It mentioned her use of alliteration, her extraordinary economy of language, but it did stray into conjecture as to why she should be so good at portraying what all children knew: that some people are extraordinarily nasty. Greene may have said Jemima Puddleduck was on a par with Jane Austen’s Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park.

Miss Potter was unconvinced. On the whole, she said, she sharply deprecated the Freudian school of criticism.