The Bluestocking, vol 133: Surely The Second Coming Is At Hand
Happy Friday!
I spent this week reading a bad book for work, and a very good book for pleasure. Craig Brown's One Two Three Four is a biography of the Beatles, in the same style as his "99 glimpses" of Princess Margaret. (This time there are 150 glimpses.)
It reminds me of one of my favourite ever profiles, Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts - see Bluestockings passim ad nauseam - which describes a collage artist in 41 abandoned introductory paragraphs. At the start of the year, I wrote a version of it for a collection of plays (now on hold) and loved doing it. Shattering the need for a linear narrative, just like shattering the conventions of poetic formulas, doesn't - or shouldn't - mean you go hog wild and abandon any structure at all. Doing that just leaves you with what I call "return key poetry", and in prose, it just feels like you couldn't be arsed to write the thing properly. Instead, a really good explosion of the form finds different hooks to pull you through, butting up facts next to each other and inviting you to compare them, sprinkling in callbacks for the reader to feel they've discovered themselves.
In the case of both Brown's "glimpses" books, a collage structure allows him to write both about his subject as a subject, and as a phenomenon. The Royal Family is a quasi-mythological entity: its failed romances, illegitimate children, sibling rivalries and wayward children take on an epic grandeur because we all know about them. The Beatles had, and have, the same quality: for a few years in the 1960s, they were everywhere. Brown uses lists of contemporary neologisms to situate them in history, and he tots up the costs of even the smallest relics (a single strand of John's hair) to demonstrate the ferocity of the Beatles industry which grew up around them.
Somewhere in the multiverse, this was the Beatles.
Now, it's not a new idea that fame and fortune don't bring happiness. But while I expected to hear about how miserable the Beatles were, living in the backseats of Rolls-Royces, surrounded by the din of screaming women, Brown also demonstrates how much unhappiness their sudden rise caused around them. Most obviously, among the musicians they displaced: the variety singers who suddenly seemed old hat, for example. Their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in America caused nothing but shame and heartache for the husband-and-wife comedy team who went on before them: no one cared about their act; their big chance was a big fat bomb. (They went back to their dressing room and asked: "How are we ever going to face the world again? This was the worst thing that ever happened to us.") And, of course, the Beatles' financial success attracted a cast of scummers and bloodsuckers, charlatans and conmen.
Brown is enjoyably biased throughout. His George is dull and earnest: drugs and meditation turn him into a proto-Russell Brand. His Paul starts off sharply acquisitive and mellows into a decent husband and father (Jane Asher's family are credited with giving him a secure bolthole through the manic years; his tenderness towards Julian Lennon is notable.) John is supremely talented, but he takes his feeling that he is fundamentally unlovable out on the rest of the world, becoming sour and brattish, until Yoko comes along and dominates him utterly, displacing Aunt Mimi. Then he just becomes unbearable. Ringo, throughout, is Ringo. He takes a suitcase full of baked beans with him to the Maharishi's ashram, fully aware that spicy food upsets his delicate stomach. He and his wife Maureen then leave early, having correctly concluded that the whole thing is a scam. There's an inverse version of Amadeus to be written about Ringo: all that proximity to talent he didn't share, and he ends up the sunniest of the four.
(Also, I defy you to read this book and not come away thinking that it was a blessing for John's reputation that he died so young. He would absolutely be on Russia Today airing his 5G conspiracy theories if he were alive now. And I say this as someone who thinks he was one of the most talented songwriters who ever lived.)
Are any of Brown's portraits fair? Who knows. Which is the point. Like the Royals, the Beatles have acquired mythological status. They are now stand-ins for personality types, for arguments about creativity, for moral lessons about fame and talent. We need people to fulfil this role for us, and yet you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
Helen
PS. I see that One Two Three Four has un-good reviews on Amazon. I slightly suspect this is down to Beatlesologists, who do not come out well. Side note: how did a band whose popularity depended on teenage girls become the object of an industry dominated by blokes?
Yet Devs feels like [Nick Offerman's] greatest leap so far. It’s a tremendous performance that sees Offerman shuttling between menace, vulnerability, goofiness and outright terror. Perhaps most impressive is the way that, as of a character who can see the future and therefore can never be surprised, he’s able to give such a relatable human performance. Given its themes, the show is bound to alienate as many people as it beguiles – something Offerman seems fully aware of.
“It’s like a great novel,” he says. “With a lot of people you can say, ‘Oh, you should read this Murakami book.’ And they’ll say, ‘Are you insane? What is this Windup Bird Chronicle? This is madness.’ But then there will be 15% of people that say, ‘Oh my god, that was the best book I’ve ever read.’ There is a quote I wear on my sleeve that goes, ‘If you’re not offending 33% of your audience, then it’s not art.’”
One of my favourite things in life is my friends telling about cool ideas they've had, and then one day seeing them become reality. The whole act of artistic creation is so multi-layered and complicated, such a delicate dance of creativity and commerce, involving so many fine judgements which ultimately come down to instinct, that a beautiful finished product is like a peacock's tail. I can't quite believe the world has allowed it to exist.
Anyway, here is the latest instalment: three summers ago, Alex Garland told me he had an idea for a television show about determinism. Actually, he told me he had an idea for a story about a tech company where a young coder gets a promotion to a mysterious part of the business, called DEVS. It's like the Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory of Silicon Valley: no one knows what happens inside. (Offerman plays the boss who set it up.)
And then, by the end of the first episode, the young coder is dead, and his girlfriend has to figure out what happened. Be still my feminist heart.
What is DEVS about? Grief, and control, and destiny, and whether our pasts define us.
Also, thanks to cinematographer Rob Hardy, it looks insanely gorgeous. His Instagram feed will make you wish that you could frame a shot like he does.
THE COVID-19 SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like droplets lightly strewn upon a table;
Let us go, past certain half-deserted streets,
To the muttering retreats
Of darkened homes with delivered Zinfandels,
Forgoing restaurants with clientele:
With children home, their tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What’s the limit?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the aisles the women come and go
Talking of the lines at Costco.
While we're on McSweeney's, I also enjoyed "I Am Using My Free Time to Not Write A Novel".
Quick Links:
Now, THIS is how you win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? What a video.
On which note, THIS is how you end an interview with the Paris Review. Bloody hell, Ray Bradbury.
Weirdly that has reminded me of one of my favourite ever tweets. "Bono. Ono. Eno."
While we're on the greatest songwriters of our age, here is Eminem explaining how, actually, loads of things rhyme with "orange".
I'm on the News Quiz tonight at 6.30pm on Radio 4. They made us . . . moo.