Young Men and Fire

For the last few days the leading news story in my corner of the world has been the shocking loss of almost an entire team of smokejumpers - nineteen out of twenty guys - who were fighting a lightning-sparked wildfire near Prescott, Arizona.  Watching the reports on what happened and why, and the sorrowing but somehow pragmatic faces of the spokespersons ("sometimes you do everything you know and everything you're taught, and it just doesn't work out"), I've found myself thinking again about a book I read maybe fifteen years ago by Norman Maclean, mainly known as the author of A River Runs Through It, called - like this post, because I can't better it - Young Men and Fire.  It's a non-fiction work about another wildfire, the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire outside of Helena, Montana, and the team of 16 young flame-jumpers who were dropped on it in what was supposed to be a routine mission until the wind changed, the fire leaped the ravine ahead of them, and they ended up in a race for their lives to the top of the ridge.  The book ambles along at a deceptively leisurely pace considering its dramatic subject, and it does tell you somewhat more than you may want to know about the science of wildfire - you have to whack your way through a lot of stuff about relative wind velocity etc -  but Maclean's clean, direct style is strangely compelling, and the story is layered like Peer Gynt's onion with tangential meditations on the impassive brutality of nature and the  tragic bravado of youth, on history and science and literature, and the peculiar sense of obligation Maclean began to feel towards the young men whose story he was trying to tell and who seemed to be asking him to find in their fragmented and incomplete history an adequate explanation for what happened to them.  He doesn't go on and on about anything, he just sets it down gently in the light of his lucid prose and leaves you to consider it on your own time.

A very effective strategy, as it turns out.  I had no particular expectations about the book one way or the other when I read it, and at the time I wouldn't have thought it had the staying power that it's proved to have, one of those books that keeps on whispering to you in various ways for years afterwards, particularly when current event so closely echoes its story. In retrospect it's begun to seem to me to be about, among other things, the nature of faith, and of courage.  There was a time when I subscribed somewhat to the theory that heroes are people without imagination - in the sense that they can act as they do because they don't project the outcome - but now that I'm more mature in both years and understanding I see that it's more complicated and more impressive than that.  Courage, I think now, isn't about the absence of imagination; it's about the transcendence of it - knowing the danger, and feeling the fear, and going forward anyway.   Just as there's no trick - and no weight - to forgiveness if the wrong is forgotten, there's no challenge to being brave if there's nothing to be frightened of.  And in these times, when such a high value is put on the need to be Forever 21 and our elderly are too often shuffled away so we don't have to see them and be forcibly reminded that we won't, it seems that nothing frightens us more than the idea of dying.  

It may be partly due to our wiring.  I read somewhere that the one thing the human brain in all its infinite complexity cannot wrap itself around is the idea of its own cessation; it can make metaphors for itself to try to understand that as an intellectual construct, but it's fundamentally a narcissistic organ, and it can't imagine a world that exists without its being there to perceive it. (You can test this out at home.  It's true.)  It's also a fear that underlies many of the messages delivered to us daily by film, television and advertising.  Every day in one way or another it's implied to us that if we just eat these foods, take these pills, buy this mattress, we won't die - it's like that game where you add the words "in bed" to ordinary phrases, try it with television commercials, you'll be amazed how often it fits.  American society spends an enormous amount of time, energy and money denying the one thing that is an absolute certainty, impartially, for everything that lives.  We can barely bring ourselves to even use The D Word anymore, referring gingerly instead to "end of life," "passing into spirit," "taking a message to the other side," anything to avoid the short sharp shock of that one blunt syllable and the great mystery that stands behind it, as if we think if we don't name it, it'll forget about us.   But people like smoke-jumpers, cops, firefighters, soldiers - anyone whose job description actually includes the considerable possibility of getting killed while doing it - are the opposite.  They own their mortality, every day, in a peculiarly healthy and well-adjusted way - because they have to, sure, and maybe also in some cases for the rush, but also because they are so fucking brave.  They balance out the rest of us. They open their arms to what the majority of us are afraid to look at, and stand up to it armed with the only things they have:  their belief in their own skill, their mastery of the best tools we can give them, and their faith that doing something of value for a greater good is, should circumstances turn against them, a worthy way to go out. 

I'm what I guess I would describe as a spiritual agnostic with pagan leanings (I think there's something out there bigger than Phil, to quote Mel Brooks, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go) and I don't know what I think comes next when we're done here,  although I believe something does.  This isn't the dress rehearsal, but the show is continuous.  Someone I knew years ago said she thought that Heaven was getting to go back to the significant moments in your life when you had to decide between two equally attractive options and make the other choice, which is a nice idea.  Maybe our after, or interim, lives are shaped by what we imagine them to be.  Maybe it's different for everyone.  If that's true, then I hope for the Prescott Jumpers there was a calm green place waiting, with a benign and cooling breeze, the music of flowing water, and the spirits of grateful trees to greet and protect them.

They've earned that. 

Nuts and Bolts

So I've been made aware that what I was hoping was an issue unique to my computer is an issue for everyone else's too - with my last post, the post titles and the sidebar information all changed from legibly tan colored to illegibly blue, and I wasn't able to get them switched back using the Template even though it appears that I should be able to.

A little online research suggests that this probably happened because the post was a long one and I created it first as an MS Word document and then copied it over into the blog template, which apparently is something you should never ever do.  (This might be useful information for Blogger to include when introducing people to their features, she said irritably.)  As I understand it, the Word coding erases and replaces a large block of HTML code in the template that governs color.  

The first two posts, when clicked on directly, seem to be fine, and if it proves that only that single post is effected I may ask for everyone's indulgence, leave it as it is and move on older and wiser with a valuable lesson learned.  If it's screwed everything up completely going forward, there is a way to correct it, but it involves either changing the color scheme of the blog (Easy Way), which I quite like and it'd be nice to keep, or taking down and reformatting the post - which naturally is a long one with lots of images, because that's how life works - and digging into the HTML code (Hard Way), which frankly is a little above my skill set and I'll need to enlist the aid of the Mac wizard.  (Fortunately I have one nearby!)

This post is a bit in the nature of a test to see just how much trouble I'm in and how much of a pain it's going to be to fix it.  Apologies to all who are struggling to read blue-on-red or red-on-red text.  I do know there's a thing, and please bear with me while I mess around with it in my semi-ept way!

Not Anything To Show More Fair

About three months ago my Artistic Director asked me if I would go as one of the theatre’s “staff hosts” on our week-long London Theatre Tour in May for subscribers and donors.  This was (a) a complete surprise (b) really flattering, my Artistic Director being a man of awe-inspiring intellect whose good opinion it’s an honor to have, and (c) made me want to go behind a door and do that thing Laura Linney does in Love Actually after she kisses the guy for the first time, because as everyone who knows me will attest, London is my best-beloved city and one I visited annually for more than 20 years before circumstances and its ascension to the title of Most Expensive City In The World put it out of my financial reach.   With the exception of one holiday visit in 2004 through the generosity of a friend, I hadn’t been back in almost fourteen years.  That’s a long, sad time to sustain a long-distance relationship.

There will be some posts coming up about the trip – one of the motivators for finally getting myself to cowboy up and start this blog was the realization that (as is always true when I travel) I had a great deal to say and share beyond what Facebook posts can accommodate or than I am comfortable putting within its voracious clutch – but before we go there, let’s create some context and talk for a while about London.

Recently as I was trawling the internet for something entirely different, I came across this quote:   “My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.”  (Ben Aaronovitch,  Moon Over Soho)   The same can probably be said about any of the world’s great cities – it’s certainly true of New York, where I grew up, and I know people who’ve had this reaction to Paris, Dublin,and less high-profile places as well.  But for me, it is and has always been London.  We go way back, London and me, to long before I ever set foot in England.  It tugged at me in the way that my friends who have home-places in their family history are tugged at by them; I spent the whole of my high school and most of my college years homesick for someplace I’d never been.  To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, America is my country, and Seattle is my city, but London…London is my hometown.

A lot of people over a lot of centuries have tried to explain just what it is about London that’s so compelling to those of us who, wherever we may have our everyday residence, think of it as “home.”   Even the dedicated journaler James Boswell was kind of stymied, but managed to come up with this:  “I was full of rich imagination of London... such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity."

Agitated with felicity.  Not bad. 

Also not bad is Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet On Westminster Bridge, written when he was 30 years old.  (Anglophiles, English Lit majors and poetry aficionados will already be ahead of me in identifying it as the source of this posting’s title.) Over the next half century Mr Sublime would go on to find many many things very nice to look at, including mountains, waterfalls, ruins of various buildings, and of course lots of daffodils in one place, and honestly for me in his later years it all gets to be a bit much really, but somehow this early poem, startled out of him on a 5 AM journey by the Dover Coach from Charing Cross to Calais, has always felt in the simplicity of its language and the clarity of its emotion absolutely genuine and spontaneous to me.

And of course, too, I know exactly how he felt.

If you stand on Westminster Bridge today, at that hour, when time is porous and you can hear the layers of history shift and rustle against each other, the sky just flushing pink behind the dome of St Paul’s, you don’t have to try very hard to see the city as Wordsworth did.  If you were to activate your Dr Who TARDIS and bring him to stand alongside you (assuming that he would just stand there and not start apostrophizing everything in sight), he would more than likely recognize it too and find it still beautiful, despite the distant premonitory
hum of the day’s 21^st century traffic and some significant changes to the skyline downriver.  There, just beyond the cathedral and the old financial district, a Tomorrowland array of bizarre corporate-owned skyscrapers of aggressively adventurous design by some of Europe’s most cutting-edge architects has bristled up in the last ten years, with cozy, clubby nicknames derived from the familiar objects they resemble and suggesting a table-setting out of Lewis Carroll:  the Cheese Grater, the Shard, the Canned Ham, the Walkie Talkie, the Onion, and, most notably, The Gherkin – which last I have to assume was assigned to it the minute the first blueprints came in to forestall its being called something it resembles a great deal more closely but somewhat less suitable for reference in mixed company.

Whether these nicknames were created in advance by the architects or a PR firm, or by Londoners in an effort to warm up to these oddball new arrivals, they’re an indicator of how quickly the city begins to flow forward and fold itself around yet another evolutionary layer.  While right now the public-school monikers are a bit like putting a tea cozy on a chainsaw, in no time they’re going to become familiar and friendly, and their owners as unsurprising and integral to the landscape as Big Ben and St. Paul’s itself - or the National Gallery, which no one liked very much either when it first happened (they called it “the Cruet Stand”) and just try to picture Trafalgar Square without it now.  The Tate Modern still looks like a crematorium to me and always will, but it doesn’t bother me any more, and the London Eye, initially such an anomaly in that stretch of the River, has quickly become organic to it.

London changes, as is inevitable and as it must, but it carries its past in its arms and very little falls out along the way.  A Roman wall faces off across a modern roadway with a tower built just after the Norman invasion.   A brutally contemporary building next to King’s Cross Rail Station is home to an original copy of the 800 year old document that was the first ever effort by the people to limit by law the power of the monarch.  In Chelsea, an apartment building called The Orchard stands where Thomas More used to walk among his beloved fruit trees, weighing his conscience against a king’s command.  A few miles further downriver, the ruins of the 16^th century Rose Theatre glow in water and shadows underneath a 20^thcentury office block.  In John Keats’ House in Hampstead, if you’re there in fine weather, two chairs stand in the side parlor just as they are in Severn’s

famous painting of the poet, with a copy of Chapman’s Homer set down on one of them and the garden door standing ajar, as if he’s just slipped out ahead of you.   And oh by the way, up in the Midlands they just found the body of Richard the Third underneath a car park, where they sort of suspected it would be because they knew what was there before (Greyfriars Church) and more or less where in that building the body had been buried, so they just had to look at the plans, which they also have.  Plus, they know who his descendants are, 700 years on, and where to find them for DNA comparison.  (Seriously, these people never throw anything away, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been on the upper floors of the Victoria & Albert Museum surrounded by literally thousands of dinner plates, or actual ceiling-height towers of earrings.)   Blue plaques on buildings everywhere announce who used to live there and what they accomplished, Dickens and Lillie Langtry and Charles I and W.S. Gilbert and P G Wodehouse and Alexander Fleming,until you start to feel that in parallel time streams they’re all still coming and going invisibly about their business, kings and clerics, politicians and poets, painters and scientists, a living pentimento.  

 

It isn’t just the real-world history that’s so present either.  Legend is as much a part of the landscape as reality.  In Berkshire, the Postcard County, you’ll find the hill where St George fought his dragon, with the bare spot on top where the dragon’s blood permanently blighted the land, and not far away is the turning for Wayland’s Smithy, where Merlin came to commission the making of Excalibur and the only place for shoeing invisible horses and forging invincible armor.  (Fans of Susan Cooper will also know that Wayland forged two of the six Great Signs of the Light, Bronze and Iron.)  In winter Herne the Hunter rides here on his black horse with blazing eyes and the Wild Hunt streaming out behind, searching for damned souls, and further west, in Somerset, are the ruins of Glastonbury, where some believe that King Arthur waits for his time to come round again, all of it fixed to the green hills by the great grey thumbtack of Stonehenge, the beating heart of mythic Britain.    And underneath all that, there’s something even more ancient, old old magic at work still:  the ley lines, the network of fairy highways that run beneath the earth, and where they intersect, men have built their places of temporal and spiritual power from the Picts right on to the present day, responding to the resonant hum of the earth under their feet.

None of this is to suggest that England is some kind of utopian civilization, that it doesn’t have its share of problems – it does - or that it’s any better than any other country at preventing history from repeating itself – it’s not.  They particularly like the one where a small but valiant group of Englishpersons ends up hopelessly overmatched by an enemy army, the weather, circumstances, geography, or all of the above, and either does or does not prevail.  It doesn’t matter which, because what the English are better at, at least to these American eyes, is acknowledging that the whole of their historical record, the bad along with the good, is pertinent to who they are in the present.  When I said earlier the English carry their history with them every day, I meant all of it:  the ignoble as well as the noble, the defeats as well as the victories.   In some ways they almost seem to prefer a glorious catastrophe to a glorious success, it reinforces their sense of themselves as people who behave well in the worst of circumstances.  (Though of course they don't always do that either - I remember being there during a walkout by the firefighters and the Underground workers that closed down the Tube, and let me tell you it was not a pretty sight on Oxford Street.)  There’s conspicuously little of the perpetual rewriting, revising and erasing of event that reflects badly on the national image that we do so compulsively in the U.S, spinning as hard as we can to pretend something didn’t happen when it manifestly did, or to creatively rearrange our history until we like it better.   BBC newsreaders reporting on American current events often seem to be just ever so slightly amused, and it’s not difficult to see why.  From the other side of the Atlantic, American news plays like the hormonal thrashings of a teenage country that doesn’t yet have the historical maturity to put its national crises in an appropriate perspective, which, combined with the equally adolescent need to be - or appear to be - always in the right, results in its responding to everything with frothing hysteria.   But a 2500 year timeline tends to put things in a different kind of context and encourages a more proportional response, and if the British don’t always manage to actually learn something from their less admirable moments, they do at least find something positive to take from them in the impetus to say, essentially, “Well that certainly happened,” and move forward with as much dignity as possible, rising above and carrying on as they are wont to do.  Rudyard Kipling wasn’t just whistling Lilliburlero when he wrote, “If you can look on triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same….”  He was quantifying an ideal of behavior that was, and is, real and observable in the English character.  

I went to England for the first time when I was junior in college.  It was my first time abroad, and also my first plane flight.  This was back in those now-unimaginable days when flying was still a little bit glamorous and people got dressed up to do it:  I wore, as I recall, a skirt, high heels, a very stylish trench-coat and a little hat that matched.  I may even have had gloves.  And I didn’t look like a freak, either – everyone was dressed that way.  (Now, of course, I wear whatever is the closest thing to pajamas.)  I remember looking out the window and seeing the countryside spread out below in a patchwork of more greens than I had ever known existed and looking remarkably like a creative plaything I used to have as a kid where you spread out a cloth patterned with streets and parks and roundabouts and put little building-block houses and things on it to make a town, and feeling both extraordinary happiness and a deep and surprisingly unsurprising sense of homecoming.   Right from that first arrival at Heathrow, everything about being there felt natural.   The money felt right in my hands.  The city mapped itself in my head with the ease and speed of something remembered.  Even the traffic coming from the wrong side felt, intellectually, right and proper (although muscle memory was harder to conquer, your body expects what it's accustomed to in spite of what your brain is telling it, and to this day I still look in both directions before I step off the kerb, just in case).   

For the next two decades I "went home" to England almost annually, thanks to the longest streak of housing good fortune in travel history.  Through most of the ‘80s I stayed – once for nearly a year - with people who were friends of a friend in New York and who became my “English family,” in a tall yellow house on Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, at the time the leading edge of the gentrification tide.
 

When I was living there the area was just beginning to be colonized, as tends to be the case, by artists, actors, musicians and writers. A famous biographer and his equally famous writer wife lived in the neighborhood; a distinguished playwright had clandestine lunches with a lady not his wife at the French bistro round the corner; and somewhere in those years we acquired a screenwriter who would eventually make the area famous and impossibly trendy by putting all its charms on film.  You can actually get a good look at Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, it’s the street that Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts walk down after she first has dinner with his friends, and the garden they climb into was our communal garden, where we used to walk the Jack Russell in the evenings.  I worked for cash in a bookshop just off the Portobello Road, and yes, there was a travel bookstore a couple of blocks away, but sadly the gentleman who ran it looked nothing whatsoever like Hugh Grant.

In the ‘90s, home base became Lennox Gardens, a quiet oval of 19^th century buildings off Walton Street in Knightsbridge, where my godfather bought and furnished a beautiful flat in the belief that he’d be spending a significant amount of time working in London and would want a pied a terre that would be ready for action whenever he walked into it.   As so often happens, things didn’t turn out quite as planned, and the flat was often untenanted, so when his pieds were a terre elsewhere he generously made it available to friends and
family who wanted to use it.   

Nearly all this part of London is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, and many of the buildings seemed to be occupied largely by cast-off relatives of the aristocracy and younger children of the lesser nobility. Staying in an earlier flat on the same street (a sort of “audition flat”, to see if the area would suit) I used to hear all about the neighbors from the building’s concierge, a small plump Irishwoman who in the time-honored tradition of concierges knew a great deal more about everybody than was probably good for her, or for them.  On the top floor we had the Honorable Mrs  M-----, who hardly ever left the precincts of her flat, since her back, like the rest of her, was 93 years old and couldn’t be counted upon to perform properly for any length of time.  Beneath her lived the Dowager Duchess S ---- and her younger sister, who made little landscapes out of seashells and sometimes felt courageous enough to exhibit them in local bookshops and galleries.  Below them and just above me was the swinging young Lady Mary C-----, whom I only ever saw on Fridays when Her Grace the Duchess, Lady Mary’s mother, came round with the Rolls to whisk her away to the races at Cheltenham or down to thecountry estate, wherever that was.  It was like being the poor relation in  a Nancy Mitford novel. 

But, in time, my lucky streak ended.  In the early oughties both the yellow house and the Knightsbridge flat were sold - if the internet is to be believed, the house went for something just shy of $4 million pounds, which tells you something about what’s happening to London real estate, goodness knows what it must be worth now – and that, for many wistful years, was that, although recently the prospect brightened considerably when my cousin's daughter Katie moved there to study at Central School of Drama and stayed on to pursue her career.  (She has a blog of her own about her adventures abroad, and it’s been a great joy to share vicariously in the start of a second generation’s love affair with England.) 

I’ve never been able to come up with an entirely satisfactory metaphor for what it feels like to me to arrive in London, to be there, but just recently one presented itself that comes as close as any, appropriately enough through a quintessentially London-ish experience I had during the Covent Garden Festival of Vocal Music, at a concert by the male a cappella group Lionheart of music written for Henry VIII and the King of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  (Bear with me, this is the long way round, but we’ll get there eventually.)  They sang in the Church of the Knights Templar in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was consecrated in 1185 –probably with Henry II in attendance, on a break from arguing with Eleanor – and looks like something out of Indiana Jones:  round, as all Templar churches are, with tombs in the floor and knights lying in effigy with their broadswords clasped on their chests.  Very Da Vinci Code.  The whole thing made one feel like an absolute speck on the timeline of history:  there we sat, listening to music sung by a contemporary group, written 500 years earlier, in a space that pre-dated the music by 300 years.  Because of its repertoire, Lionheart is used to performing in this kind of acoustically challenging venue, and they know exactly how to pace and place the music so that the reverberation becomes an enhancement and not a liability, singing with such a pure and perfectly blended straight tone that when they’re in unison the effect really is of a single voice.  When not, each harmony is crystalline and complete, hanging alone in the air for a split second before passing on to the next, so that one has the experience of hearing each chord for itself at the same time as hearing its place in the whole.   Each selection at the end would hang suspended on the seventh for a moment, and then a single voice inside the harmony would shift cleanly and precisely from one note to another – no scooping or sliding for these guys – and complete the resolution, inevitable as the keystone sliding into the top of an arch.  It gave you a kind of piercing satisfaction, almost physical, as if that simple transition from suspension into perfect balance momentarily brought your soul into alignment with the universe. 

And that is what returning to London, being in London, feels like to me: something that all the rest of the time feels unresolved lifts quietly and lightly into place.  And for as long as it lasts, until it’s time to go, there is completion, and harmony, and beauty, and peace.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair:     

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 

A sight so touching in its majesty: 

This City now doth, like a garment, wear 

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, 

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky; 

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

 Never did sun more beautifully steep 

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; 

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! 

The river glideth at his own sweet will: 

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

 And all that mighty heart is lying still!                                

       "On Westminster Bridge", William Wordsworth

 

Photo credit, Westminster Palace: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/piero/2193243542/">Piero Sierra</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>   Photo credit, John Keats: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/baxterboy/6064612547/">timechaser</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>

Photo credit, Notting Hill: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcanevet/486111647/">manuel | MC</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA</a> 

Photo credit, Thames Sunrise: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/66720528@N04/8475403157/">James Blunt Photography</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">CC BY-ND</a>

It's My Party: "This House" (National Theatre)

I came very close to passing on the National Theatre Live broadcast of James Graham's political play This House yesterday afternoon.  Thanks to the original House of Cards series and some spirited dinner table conversations in England in the '80s,  I know a bit about how Parliament works on the day to day level, but not a lot, and somehow a play about the slow implosion of the Labour Party through the "hung" Parliaments of 1974 to 1979 sounded like it might be just a little too topical to hold my interest.  Fortunately, I did some research online and was sufficiently encouraged by the British reviews ("an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through an era of political upheaval!" - British Theatre Guide) to overcome my anxiety and go anyway, and I'm so glad I did!

32 year old playwright James Graham (who's quite young enough without adding insult to injury by also looking like he's about 12) does a masterful job of "educating" the audience in the vocabulary and terms of the story as he's telling it, providing exposition and backstory so seamlessly you almost don't notice, a particularly impressive achievement given that he wouldn't be born until 3 years after the close of the play's events.   Broadly speaking, during the five years in question neither Labour nor the Tories held a clear voting majority in the House of Commons, and even when Harold Wilson's minority Labour government was voted in it still was only up by three votes, with the result that it was nearly impossible to definitively pass any legislation.
For both parties, every vote was crucial and every voting member had to be present for every vote that was called - pregnant, ill, drunk, stoned, their condition was irrelevant as long as they could be dragged or drag themselves through the Yes or No lobby to be counted.  The Whips, whose job it is to get the votes in for their party, were in a constant high-stress frenzy, making sure their MPs were on side, chivvying the more rebellious ones to make sure they toed the party line, and most importantly trying to lure the votes of the smaller parties (referred to with gallows humor as "the odds and sods" and including the Liberals, Scots and Irish Nationals, and the Welsh) to widen their margin.  The back corridors of Westminster were a 24/7 madhouse of shifting alliances with no holds barred to manipulate the legislative outcome: bullying, bribery, blackmail, and even the occasional beat-down.  On one memorable occasion, which makes a great set piece for the play, there was an actual brawl in the House chamber with Michael Heseltine swinging at everybody in sight with Charles II's ceremonial mace.

The situation is similar in many respects to the legislative deadlock in the American Congress during the first four years of the Obama administration, particularly as the body's responsibility to govern and protect the interests of the people begins to become secondary to just obstructing the opposition and keeping them from accomplishing anything towards their political agenda.  The difference is cultural, and significant: Parliament still runs less by rule and regulation than on tradition, sportsmanship and a particularly English belief in the inviolability of the gentlemen's agreement.  Sooner or later almost every character in the play finds him (or in a couple of instances her) self having to confront how far they're actually willing to go for the sake of party loyalty.  What gives the piece its emotional heft is that inevitable conflict between political expedience and individual conscience, and the equally inevitable moment when the point is reached that honour, and the ideals that brought these guys into politics in the first place, can no longer be ignored or pushed aside.

Originally performed in the National's smallest space, the Cottesloe (small being a relative term - the "little" Cottesloe is the size of ACT's mainstage theatres), the production was so successful that it was moved into the largest of them, the Olivier, for an extended run. Scenic designer Rae Walsh rose impressively to the challenge, with the inspired idea of seating some audience members in the "back benches" on the Olivier's famous turntables, which shift position between scenes to define locations, while the actors play in a stationary space between them and the audience out front:  Tory Whip's office stage left, Labour Whip's office stage right (a bit of designer humour there perhaps!), and an area in between which is sometimes the center aisle of the House and at other times various party-neutral locations around Westminster.  Hanging over everything is the gigantic lower half of the face of Big Ben, not only the iconic image of the political power located in the Palace of Westminster, but also the indication to Londoners that, at least in theory, their government is hard at work and literally "burning the midnight oil" on their behalf :  when Parliament sits late into the night, the lamp at the top of the clock tower is lit; when it finally rises to go home, it's extinguished.

Director Jeremy Herrins gives the script a vital, high-stakes, high-octane production that captures both the relentless physical and mental energy of this world and the equally relentless psychological stress it creates.  There's a driving authenticity to it that makes you feel that this must really have been what it was like during these madhouse years, and it's played at speed and with blistering wit and ferocity by one of those giant, deep-bench ensemble casts the National can field, 23 actors in about twice that many roles.  With the exception of Vincent Franks, who for me was the least effective among the principals, his weepy, hysterical characterization of Labour's Michael Cocks becoming wearyingly one-note as the play went on, pretty nearly everyone delivers, but there are standout contributions in the considerable crowd.   Julian Wadham, a familiar face from British television, delights as the giddily effete Conservative Whip, peering like a loveable schoolmaster over his spectacles and fussing about grammatical correctness ("That wasn't assonance, was it?"), and enjoying the game of it all so much that he practically dances around his office - for him the worst of the situation is that it begins to stop being fun.  The it must be said extremely dishy Charles Edwards (currently Lady Edith's tragically married love interest on Downton Abbey and so wonderful as Richard Hannay in the original company of The 39 Steps) as his Deputy Jack Weatherill is the epitome of a certain kind of ideal English gentleman, square-jawed but sensitive around the eyes, perfect suit, perfect posture, perfect hair, perfect easy charm even when defending his corner.  Edwards has a sublime gift for light comedy, so much harder to play than it looks when it's done properly, and he deploys it here to excellent effect - you wouldn't believe the impact he can make with the flick of an eye-brow or a fleeting thin third of a smile.  Reece Dinsdale is all northern bonhomie and cheerfully boorish profanity as Labour Whip Walter Harrison, whom it is a mistake to underestimate but whose bantam-rooster aggression hides a warm heart - the relationship between him and Edwards' Weatherill is the central one of the play -  and Matthew Pidgeon plays, with admirable commitment to the task, a rogue's gallery of obnoxious MPs from both sides of the aisle.  ("Is this even a real job?" complains one on being given a post as Arts Minister in the Shadow Cabinet.  "It makes me sound like a wizard - Shaaaaaaadow  Aaaarts.")

At just over three hours it's a daunting evening in prospect, but in practice it goes like a bullet-train with very few lulls in the proceedings, and I was happily surprised by how much suspense and excitement was generated from what sounded like potentially the most boring idea for a play imaginable.  It's an invigorating reminder of how thrilling political theatre can be, and how discouraging it is that in our current environment in this country we're not making it anymore.  Political plays tend to be big, and therefore expensive, which is a practical problem, but the larger issue is that I think American playwrights are afraid to write them and theatres are for the most part reluctant to produce them for fear of alienating subscribers or donors.  (American audiences don't in general have the philosophical equanimity of British ones about seeing themselves, their country or their government depicted in less than flattering terms.  We don't like not being Exceptional, and we don't like being reminded how often we are not, it's a peculiar kind of self-generated artistic censorship.  This House was a roaring hit in London, with MPs from both sides of the aisle in regular attendance and enjoying the hell out of it.  It's hard to imagine a similar play about the U.S. Congress being received with comparable enthusiasm on this side of the Atlantic.)  The noteworthy political plays about the United States in recent years - Stuff Happens, Frost/Nixon, Continental Divide - are all by British writers. The English have for centuries gone to the theatre to see the issues of the day argued on stage, and as a way of triggering public and private debate about the state of the nation and its institutions.   It's a great shame that we've lost that perspective.  It is healthy, and it is part of what theatre is for.

The National Theatre Live broadcast of This House has three more showings at Seattle Film Festival/Uptown Cinema on June 17, 22 and 24, and at other times and venues around the country.

Photo credit: <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA</a>

Embracing the Fuse Box Dwarf

First of all, before you ask:  what about this title, then?  Tenzing’s Boots?  Isn’t it a little….random?

Well, yes, it is, and that’s part of the reason I like it, since I anticipate that as blogs go, this one is likely to be more random than not in its content.

But the main reason I chose it is a slightly longer story, and, having as it does a certain randomness of its own, seems like an appropriate place to start.  When I was a very little girl in New York, there was a touring exhibition that came through town about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest (yesterday, by the way, May 29, was the 60^th Anniversary of their achievement, which is a nice piece of synchronicity), and one of the things on display was the pair of boots that Tenzing wore to the summit. This is one of those things that I can’t be sure I actually remember, or only think I remember because my mother told me the story so many times, but somehow this phrase, “Tenzing’s Boots,” caught my attention, and delighted me so much that for days I marched around the apartment chanting happily to myself over and over, “Ten-zing’s Boots.  Ten-zing’s Boots.”    Looking back, I think that although of course I didn’t know it at the time, this may have been the first glimmer of understanding in my baby brain that if words are combined in a certain way, they can create a kind of pleasure that goes beyond, or is independent of, their literal meaning.  Even today, the phrase “Tenzing’s Boots” makes me smile, for reasons that have nothing to do with mountain climbing, Sherpas, or footwear.  I just like the way it sounds.   

This is why a stylishly written novel with a lively narrative voice is more pleasurable as a reading experience than a textbook, and poetry functions almost entirely on this dual level.  Take a look at some  e e cummings or Dylan Thomas if you haven’t lately:  the way that we comprehend a phrase like “When I was green and easy under the apple boughs….”  has at least as much, if not more, to do with the way those words are put together, with the rock and flow of the sound and the lazy stretch of those long EEs, as it does with what they actually word-for-word mean.  There’s a world of difference between how we respond to “Whose woods these are, I think I know” and “I think I know who these woods belong to,” even though both phrases mean the same thing.

But we’re straying a bit from our sheep – something which, if you keep up with me, you’ll find I have a tendency to do, and if you’ve ever had an extended conversation with me you’ll know that we can really sometimes go all round the houses before getting back to the main point.

And to that end: this episode with the boots, which you’ll remember is where we started, may also be the earliest recorded indication that writing might turn out to be something I could do.   I’m too old to be coy about it:  words work for me.  They always have.  The ability to put together a sentence that not only had coherence and content but was also articulate, reasonably stylish, and pleasurable to read was certainly instrumental in my being accepted at my first-choice university (and yes, I went to Yale – to quote Darren Nichols, deal with THAT), and crucial to my getting the financial aid package that made it possible for me to take up the place that was offered.   I wrote thousands of words on my way to a degree in English Literature, and hundreds more about theatre and film as an arts stringer for the venerable Yale Daily News.  Right up through the end of my college years, everyone I knew – including me – assumed I would be a writer.  They also assumed, with equal assurance, that my sister, who is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction and teaches both at Skidmore, was going to be in the theatre.  Life is funny, huh.  (Although honestly it would be funnier if some of these people would stop expressing their profound disappointment at my failure to do what they expected and be happy that I’ve spent my life doing something else that I love and feel passionately about.)

Writing has, however, continued to be a considerable value-added skill for me.  I write primarily now for the theatre where I work as Casting Director and Artistic Associate – artistic statements, essays for the show programs, promotional materials of various kinds – which keeps my hand in.  For the better part of 25 years I was a dedicated journaler (and I mean really dedicated, like pages and pages every day for years), until one day I realized that I was so busy narrating my life that I wasn’t, or so it seemed to me, actually living it; I was never fully present in the experience of any given moment, because part of my mind was always working on how I was going to write about it later, and this seemed to be in my case not a particularly healthy situation.   While to write about something is, for me, an important and effective way to process things, to fix them in memory, or, if I’m feeling at the mercy of random event, to gain some traction in getting back in charge of things (and maybe later when we all know each other better I’ll come back to that last one and talk more about why it’s an important issue for me), and I still sometimes use it in all of those ways, it had begun to be a kind of barrier and something that instead of connecting me more to the world, was distancing me from it.  And so more by instinct than through any conscious decision, I started to back away from the journaling and eventually, about ten years ago, stopped altogether.  It was a hard impulse to curb for a long time, and then eventually, as with human friendships, it was so long since I’d done it that it was just awkward and overwhelming to think about taking it up again, and after that it was much easier doing without.

And other things took the place of the journals – emails, Facebook (which I very much enjoy, although I’m careful not to let it take over my life), and from time to time, if I’m traveling – which always tweaks the writing urge -, letters to friends, which as some of you can attest are sometimes on an intimidatingly epic scale.  (I think it’s a great loss to civilization, and to human communication, that so few people write letters any more.  Will anyone curl up, in future years, with someone’s Collected E-mails?)  Increasingly over the last few years people have suggested to me that I should start a blog, and I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, but I haven’t quite been able to cozy up to the idea.

There have been a couple of reasons for my reluctance.  One is that I guard my privacy very closely.  I believe that being known is a privilege that should be earned, we owe ourselves that respect, and it unnerves me, in this age of universal access to everything, how readily we are throwing it away with both hands.  (Anyone who’s ever had to listen to a cell phone conversation on the bus about some stranger’s last pelvic exam, the death of their mother, or the terms of their divorce will know what I’m talking about.)  The other, which is at least as significant, is that it seemed to me there are more than enough people sharing their unsolicited opinions on the Internet, regardless of whether they have any interest or importance for anyone else.  I’m not talking about the many wonderful and often very helpful blogs that are out there (I think of the late Guy Adkins’ extraordinary account of his battle with colon cancer, or the parents who write about how they’re meeting the challenges of everything from bullying to homework to sexual questioning in their kids, or my friend Morgan’s marvelous chronicle of her travels in India and the accompanying  exploration of her own spirituality and sense of self), but about the other kind:  the relentless, esturine flow of pointless personal minutiae that has no possible significance or interest for anyone other than the person to whom it’s happening.   It is a great failing , I know, I should have more compassion for such people; it’s hardly surprising , after all, that as our feelings of alienation and anonymity grow in proportion to our numbers and to the influence of the Internet itself, people should be more and more compelled to assert their individual existence, to say, somehow, Look at me! Listen to me!  I exist!  But I can’t help it.  I’m reminded inescapably of John Bellairs’ Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who “popped out from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed ‘Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!’”  (The House With the Clock In Its Walls)  That is how I picture cyberspace:  a vast whiteness stretching into infinity, filled with people each one standing on an egg crate and screaming “Dreeb! Dreeb!” at the top of his or her lungs.   I could not imagine adding my voice to the cyber-clamor, or very much wanting to.

But here’s the thing:  I miss it, the writing.    I miss writing for my own pleasure (as opposed to writing to order, which is mainly what the last several years have been, although that has its own rewards), and I miss writing for the pleasure and entertainment of a reader, the particular satisfaction of finding just the right combination of words (“Tenzing’s Boots”) that might give someone else not just the description of an event or a place or a person, but the feeling of it, and to do it in a way that’s elegant and enjoyable.   (I know there’s a school of thought that says a writer is a writer even if they only put all their short stories in a box at the back of the closet and never show them to anyone, but I can’t agree with it.   What would be the point of that?  For me, a writer implies a reader, and vice versa – can’t be the one without having the other.)   This feeling has been getting stronger over the last couple of years, and recently escalated during a trip to London (travel, as I said, always sparking the circuitry for me) to where I finally thought, I really need to make a place in my life for writing again.

And so here I am, finally putting the first tentative toe out into the blogosphere.  (A terrible, ugly word by the way, we must think of another one immediately.)   I’m taking the Fuse Box Dwarf as a cautionary figure in this new landscape, and I’m hoping to stay committed to the notion of posting only when I feel like I have something more or less interesting or entertaining to say, current or retroactive (for example, I’ve written a lot over the years about theatre productions and performances, some of which may be of some historical interest)  or when I can’t ignore the twitch in the brain and the itch in the fingers that says “I have to write about that”.  I’ll try not to talk about what kind of sandwich I considered having for lunch, or the salad I decided to have instead, unless it’s some kind of metaphor.  I can’t absolutely guarantee that there may not be, just very occasionally, a faint whisper of dreebish-ness now and again, but should that happen perhaps we can all agree to be tolerant of one another, and accept that dreebism is to some degree  an inevitable human impulse.   Even a handprint on the wall of a cave can be viewed as a kind of prehistoric cry of “Dreeb!”   At the end of the day, if we’re honest, there’s probably a little Fuse Box Dwarf in all of us, and perhaps that’s as it should be.