Rodin & Eros

Rodin & Eros

By Pascal Bonafoux

Thames & Hudson, 2013

ISBN: 9780500239001

At the start of this beautiful, lavishly illustrated book, the author quotes Gide on the difference between pornography and erotic art or literature.

For many critics and learned commentators, erotic art and literature (so defined) is quite different to porn.  It has a moral purpose, a higher intellectual intent; it doesn’t appeal simply to the prurient interest.  Yet Gide is admirably clear-sighted and straightforward, not to say surgical, when it comes to making the distinction: for him the difference is simply one of talent.  And there is an end to it.  If someone is a lech, and a great artist  as well, they will create great erotic art.  A lesser talent will have to be content with the pornographer tag.

Rodin was much enamoured with young women; the female form was an obsession and a fascination, an overriding passion, as Pascal Bonafoux’s book makes plain.  He has written 42 essays about the artist (a sampling of titles: Beauty, Flesh, Desire, Venus, Lust, Sin…), some light and brief but all unfailingly interesting, and there are 156 Illustrations, 140 of them in colour.  Most essays are centred on a particular work, and collectively they cover a period of about 40 years (1871-1911), for Rodin was always working, sketching even at the last.  We learn some interesting things: for example, that The Kiss (1899) was inspired by Dante; that Rodin saw Nijinsky dance; of his affinity with Baudelaire, Mirbeau and Flaubert.

The illustrations include drawings and watercolours (some intended solely for Rodin’s private portfolio, whatever that means: for a French fellow, Pascal Bonafoux can be awfully coy) as well as many excellent photos of the great sculptures, the bronzes with their dark fiery gleam.  What happens most in the sculptures?  Man and woman, faun and nymph, human and immortal embrace, hold each other close.  They embrace.  That tells you pretty much all you need to know about Rodin, in truth: Eros was his daemon.

There is a Rodin Museum, something I hadn’t previously been aware of.

The publisher’s description of Rodin & Eros can be read here.

The Return of the Thin Man

The Return of the Thin Man

By Dashiell Hammett

Head of Zeus, 2012

ISBN: 9781908800206

It is not classic Hammett by any means, but it is good enough, it will do.

There are two complete stories, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man, both about 100 pages long, and an outline of a third story entitled Sequel to the Thin Man.  I would be reluctant to call the two stories novellas, because they’re not strictly speaking literary works, they were not written to be published or widely read.  Rather, they were written to be adapted into a screenplay and filmed.  So some fellow would come along and read a story then write a screenplay based upon it.  Plot details had to be crystal-clear to him, so you’ll find (for example) more expansiveness and less guile than you’d normally get in a Hammett novel or story.

When After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man were released (in 1936 and 1939 respectively) they proved to be highly successful films, due in no small measure to the presence of William Powell, reprising the role of Nick Charles.  Approaching the stories on their own, you may well ask: are they as successful for the reader?

Well, in part.  They show Hammett’s main strengths: he can vividly paint a scene, create convincing characters and come up with witty, idiomatic dialogue.  The banter between Nick and Nora is a highlight.  And you will also find some neat vaudeville set-ups and screwball situations, quite surprising because a deft comic touch is not evident in most of Hammett’s other work (The Thin Man and a few stories being the exceptions).

But you’re never really fully immersed in either story in truth, for it always feels like something is just out of focus.  For a start, the two stories are written in the present tense, most likely for clarity.  You can see the events happening, unfolding before your eyes, but it is somehow all too light.  Furthermore, there is too much clutter by way of expansive description and cutesiness (these escapades invariably involving Asta the dog) for it to be classic Hammett.  What you yearn for is the great writer’s spare, well-crafted, hardboiled prose.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to read everything that Hammett has written, but be warned that this is not literature, simply because language doesn’t set out to do everything.  Then again, screen stories like these (and The Third Man by Graham Greene is another example) are an interesting genre, primarily for what they might reveal about the writer.

The publisher’s description of The Return of the Thin Man can be read here.

Seduction of the Innocent

Seduction of the Innocent

By Max Allan Collins

Cover art by Glen Orbik

Hard Case Crime, February 2013

ISBN: 9780857687487

This is the third of Max Allan Collins’ novels set in ’50s New York and featuring Jack Starr, troubleshooter for a comic strip syndicate and a PI by any other name.

Here Starr is called upon to solve the murder of a do-gooder, a psychiatrist concerned with the pernicious effect of comics on impressionable young minds.  It’s a superior mystery characterized by Collins’ vivid storytelling and trademark punchy prose; and if you know something (or a lot) about comics, you’ll enjoy it all the more.

When given an opportunity to interview Max Allan Collins, I naturally asked him about the background to the novel and his own relationship with comics:

I enjoyed spotting the comics references in your latest Jack Starr novel, Seduction of the Innocent, the references to various artists & creators, and the description of a notorious panel by Jack Cole on page 88.  What attracted you about setting a novel in this milieu, the golden age of comics?

Max Allan Collins: I’ve been a comics fan since childhood, and around age six, I became aware of Dr. Frederic Wertham and his attacks on comics.  I saw EC disappear and that dreaded “Comics Code Authority” stamp start appearing on the covers of comic books, which meant to me that they would be watered-down.  I read SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT – Wertham’s “non-fiction” book, not my novel – over and over again, using it as a guide for comic books to look for.

Really, when comics fandom started turning into something, in the ‘70s, everybody knew of Wertham, and hated him, or what he stood for.  When Bill Mumy, Miguel Ferrer and Steve Leialoha first put our band together in the ‘80s, to play at comic cons, we immediately took the name Seduction of the Innocent.  We knew it would resonate with everybody who was into comics.  Miguel’s idea, by the way.

Having written comics as well as novels, could I ask for your thoughts on comics as a medium.  What possibilities does the medium offer the writer?

MAC: I’m not writing comics as often as I used to – for a long time, it was part of my daily writing life.  Now, when I return to it, I realize how difficult it is.  The medium is really very complex, for a writer – lots of decisions.  There’s an obvious need to think visually, there’s a need to write concisely yet vividly, there’s a need to think the story through in little slices, little pieces of time.

Though comics writing is very different from screenwriting and novel-writing, it does help a writer on both those fronts – particularly visual thinking.

Are you still a comics fan?  Have you followed Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets series and what did you make of it as a work of hard-boiled fiction?

MAC: I sampled it, thought it was first-rate, but I don’t really follow comics much anymore.  I don’t read many mystery novels, either.  I really don’t want to be influenced.  I’m too natural a mimic, frankly.  The only storytelling area I still follow, as a fan, is film.  Though I’m a filmmaker of sorts, I realize there is still a lot for me to learn.  That’s not to indicate that I can’t learn anything about writing comics or novels at this point, but I do have both of those pretty well down, and any learning I do will be self-taught, as a I refine, and explore within, what I already know.

Were these (EC, etc.) your comics as a kid?  Or if you came to comics later (the most important question of them all): did you read Marvel or DC?

MAC: Comic books were my life from around age four through college.  For many years, I wanted to be a cartoonist, and was the kid who passed around his homemade comics at school for everybody to read.  But I got interested in private eyes during the craze on TV in the late fifties and early sixties, PETER GUNN, 77 SUNSET STRIP, PERRY MASON.  I got hooked on the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, and I retained my comics interest, but my ambition to be a cartoonist was replaced with wanting to be a mystery writer.  It’s somewhat ironic that the first major gig of my career was a comic strip, DICK TRACY – which I’d been obsessed with as a kid.

I read all the so-called Silver Age comics – SHOWCASE with the Flash.  I subscribed to CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN – I must have been in first or second grade.  I bought every issue of SPIDERMAN and FANTASTIC FOUR and all the other Marvels off the stands, from day one – including AMAZING FANTASY 15.  I lost interest, somewhat, when Ditko left SPIDERMAN.  EC I knew from childhood – it was taken away from me shortly after I discovered it…by the Wertham witch hunt.  In college and the decade thereafter, I collected EC Comics as best I could – they were outrageously expensive, even then.  In answer to your implied question, I was neither a DC nor a Marvel guy.  I was a comic book guy.  When Kirby was drawing CHALLENGERS, I was DC.  When Kirby was drawing all that stuff at Marvel, I was Marvel.  Hell, I even bought those monster comics he did – VIM VAM VOOM, that kind of nonsense.  I loved it.  And I bought SUPERMAN and BATMAN all through those years – Wayne Boring, Dick Sprang.  Great stuff.

Would you say there’s evidence of homophobia in Wertham’s original Seduction of the Innocent?

MAC: There’s a smoking phallic gun.  He not only sees homosexuality in Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson – and lesbianism in Wonder Woman – he considers homosexuality a sickness and perversion.  That’s not unusual for the time frame, but what he reads into those innocent comic books (well, maybe not Wonder Woman – there’s bondage in there, obviously, and Marston was a freak) reveals a deeply homophobic individual.

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This article was posted as part of the Seduction of the Innocent Blog Tour, celebrating the release of Max Allan Collins’ new Hard Case Crime novel.  More details about the blog tour are here, and the publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

For the opportunity to win a copy of the book, simply tweet “I would like a copy of Seduction of the Innocent @TitanBooks #MaxAllanCollins”.

Little Book of Vintage Terror

Little Book of Vintage Terror

By Tim Pilcher

ILEX, 2012

ISBN: 9781781570029

In this compact book, easily slipped into an inside pocket, there are myriad comic book images from the 1950s, rude and rough-hewn depictions of the wonders of the world and the wayward wickedness it holds.

There are images of carnivorous flowers, giant insects, baying banshees, mad scientists, sinister skeletons, screaming maidens, ghosts and ghouls, vampires and zombies… and much else.  Not any angels, mind.  Marcus Gheerhaerts the Elder’s great etching, Allegory of Iconoclasm, meets its comic art equivalent in the frontispiece of the book.

Although cover images predominate (the titles themselves being suitably suggestive: Out of the Night, Weird Terror, Forbidden Worlds, The Hand of Fate, Haunted…) there are some complete stories as well, together with a selection of stand-alone panels.  They are kitsch verging on creepy.  He looks in the bathroom mirror, this one fellow, intending simply to shave, and sees a skull staring back.

The moral panic concerning comics as it played itself out in America is well known, due in large part to David Hajdu’s excellent book The Ten Cent Plague; and Max Allan Collins’ current novel, The Seduction of the Innocent, takes this foofarah as its background.  By contrast, the similar moral campaign in Britain has not been widely covered, even though it culminated in the Children and Young Persons’ (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955, an Act that’s apparently still in force today.  Therefore Tim Pilcher, a renowned historian when it comes to these matters, devotes some salubrious space to this campaign in his introduction.

But who could ever have believed that these bold, gaudy pictures, accompanying as they do such twisted, mendacious stories and fantasies, could ever do permanent harm to impressionable young minds?  On the contrary they have a certain cute (now kitsch) charm and add spice to life!

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.  A description of the Little Book of Vintage … series can be read here.

Feydeau, First to Last

Feydeau, First to Last

By Georges Feydeau

Translated and Introduced by Norman R. Shapiro

Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2001

ISBN: 9781557834638

He wrote over 40 farces, this Feydeau fellow, a large number of them having just the one act.

This book has eight such one-act efforts, including the first and last plays produced in Feydeau’s lifetime – hence the title.  I say ‘produced’ advisedly because, as Norman R. Shapiro explains in his erudite, informative introduction, it is difficult to say exactly when some of these plays were written.  The translations read very well indeed.  And although in American English, they could easily be modified for the British stage.

To many, the plays will evoke the world of Fawlty Towers; and it should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that John Cleese has often expressed his admiration for Feydeau.  It is interesting in this regard to look at Les Paves de l’ours from 1896, a play wherein an upper-class bachelor employs a country bumpkin as a man-servant, believing him to be ‘a diamond in the rough’.  He hopes in time to polish this diamond and thereby to bring order into his life.  Of course, the man proves to be a blundering idiot and complete chaos ensues.  Whenever the bachelor turns to the man-servant for aid, he always makes matters worse.  There’s not a thing he can do as his world disintegrates around him.  Clearly, their relationship is essentially that of Basil and Manuel in Fawlty Towers.  Note also that a hotel will have many of the stock characters (waiter, maid, cook…) you’d expect to find in an upper-class residence in Feydeau’s day.

From the viewpoint of stagecraft, there is a lot that can be learnt from Feydeau’s use of monologue – most of these plays begin with a lone character onstage, talking aloud – and aside.  Aside as a device is especially used to involve the audience, to let them in on the joke, to gently reel them in.  Feydeau is always fishing for laughter and he usually gets a tug on the line.  Another instructive factor lies in seeing how a character will flit from being a narrator (addressing the audience) to an actor in the unfolding drama (oblivious to the audience, obviously) at different moments.  Say, like Hector in Par la fenetre.  It’s all very cleverly and sweetly and subtly done.

Golden comedy, riotous and surreal situations, and at root scathing vision of humankind, that’s what you find on Feydeau’s stage.  The men are venal and egotistical, the women vain and fickle.  The world of the Divine Marquis, but with lashings of jokes as each layer of moral corruption is flayed back.  You laugh most times to keep from crying out in despair.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo

The Complete Flash Gordon Library, Volume 1

By Alex Raymond

Titan Books, 2012

ISBN: 9780857681546

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

So, you are wondering: how does it all begin?

Well, as set out above: Flash Gordon, a ‘Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player’ (so one of the world’s finest: smart, sporty and surely flush with cash), is forced at gun point into a rocket ship.  He’s accompanied by a pretty young woman, wouldn’t you know it, name of Dale Arden, and the two have just become intimate, well kind of, by parachuting out of a plane together.  As for the fellow holding the gun, that’s a brilliant though mad scientist called Hans Zarkov.  The rocket ship, Zarkov‘s own invention, heads towards a feral planet that’s on a collision course with our own.  The aim is to save our world by deflecting the wayward planet off course, and this they succeed in doing, but at a price.  They crash land on the planet’s surface – see strip below.  Yes, that’s pretty much how Flash Gordon’s adventures begin…

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This sumptuous volume has nine complete stories in total, originally published from 1934 to 1937.  The full-colour comic strips (this was way before comic books, never mind graphic novels) have been beautifully restored by Peter Maresca, and for those who were introduced to Flash Gordon by watching black and white serials on a Saturday morning in the local cinema (it was The Rialto in Salford and Bury Odeon for me), Alex Raymond’s artwork will come as a revelation as well as a return to childhood.  His colour illustrations are magical, wonderfully exciting, enchanting and (let’s be frank) just a wee bit kinky at times, just like the serial.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For at the basis of Flash Gordon is a love quartet: Ming the Merciless desires Dale and his daughter Princess Aura lusts after Flash.  Aura was always kidnapping/enslaving/punishing girlish and innocent Dale, her love rival, and Ming had it in for Flash too.  Dale is always rescued by Flash (eventually) and Aura constantly saves Flash from her father’s clutches.  Capture, play, escape; escape, capture, play…  Looking back, it was all very strange to see this stuff  in a children’s serial on a Saturday morning.

You wanted to be Flash Gordon, of course, because he was the hero, brave and strong and noble, able to withstand torture…  But Ming’s gig – Emperor of the Universe, infinite power, all those lackeys at his command – didn’t seem too bad either.

Flash Gordon © 2012 King Features Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In this book, there are appreciative introductions by Alex Ross and Doug Murray, which set Alex Raymond’s creation in context.  Flight was still something new in 1934 and sci-fi was an inchoate genre.  Wells, Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs fed Raymond’s imagination and he in turn influenced many others (Joe Kubert and George Lucas, to name but two).  There’s also some of Alex Raymond’s hitherto unpublished artwork.  It’s a terrific package, all told.

Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo by Alex Raymond, Volume 1 of The Complete Flash Gordon Library, is out now from Titan Books, priced £29.99.  The publisher’s description of this wonderful book can be read here.

Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch

Le Sacre du printemps

Music by Igor Stravinsky

Choreography by Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, 2012

ISBN: 9782851817747

Just the half an hour or so, that’s all it lasts, but it rapidly becomes unbearably involving even so.

It’s due to the intensity of the drama, the way you’re drawn into the urgency for renewal, how it unremittingly builds and builds.  You feel it in the pulse of your blood.  And for renewal to come about a chosen one, a sacrifice/scapegoat, is needed.  Who will wear the red dress, and dance unto death?

It is the tenderness that scares the others off, those who decline the dress.  A hand reaching out to caress, let’s say.  Or it may be what they read in the man’s face: desire, need, hunger.  Death wants only the very brave.

This last dance is, as well as being thrilling and climactic and incredibly moving, simply an incredible performance.  For how do you attain in dance an absolute abandonment (one culminating in the loss of life itself) while retaining always at least a crumb of control?  Death may no longer be a taboo; but dying is.

There is an elemental quality to the staging, in keeping with the nature of the ballet and Stravinsky’s disconcerting score: the men in black trousers, the women in white ethereal dresses (a nod to Café Muller perhaps), looking for all the world like two antagonistic packs, hunting each other.  The earth lies strewn at their feet.  A red garment is the stark battle line between them.  In Bausch’s choreography, whose subtle geometry is here apparent, their movements reach for the fluidity of ballet but anxiety always fractures the harmony of the moment.  Dance constantly morphs into drama and violence.

This performance was filmed in Wuppertal in 1978, three years after its premiere there, and it still feels dangerous and edgy even now.  There is an accompanying booklet with the DVD, which includes black and white stills from the film and a first-hand account by Jo Ann Endicott, one of Bausch’s dancers, of being involved in those first productions.  And Cocteau writes about the first responses to Le Sacre du printemps in Paris in May 1913, and of his friendship with Stravinsky and Diaghilev.  The booklet is in French, German and English.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

The Crime of Julian Wells

The Crime of Julian Wells

By Thomas H. Cook

Head of Zeus, 2012

ISBN: 9781908800145

This, Cook’s latest novel, is a very fine Gothic concoction indeed.

The characters are well drawn: robust and fragile, brave and fraught with fear, human all too human.  There is an intricate story, brimming with suspense, expertly told.  And the theme is a big one, one that Cook had addressed also in Instruments of Night, the book whom many (and I count myself among them) regard as his masterpiece.  The novel is all about Evil’s contagion, its propensity to damage those who do little more than come into contact with it, breathe the same fetid air for a moment.  Cook suggests that that little is more than sufficient.  Some stains cannot be removed.

It begins with a suicide: Julian Wells, a writer who had made several studies of evil, ends his own life.  He takes a boat out to the middle of a lake beyond the family home, then very deliberately slits his wrists.  What made him do it?  And why, in all his writings, was he always drawn to darkness, to serial killers and mass murderers, to those who inflict torture and implement genocide?

These are the questions that his friend Philip Anders, a mediocre literary critic, is haunted by and seeks to answer.  They lead him around the world and closer to home than he had bargained for.  Too close for comfort, in fact.

There is a (slight) postmodern knowingness to it all (Anders, the narrator, is a literary critic after all, and alludes to other writers within his own anxious tale) but Cook delivers a good story, no worries.  At one point Anders is compared to Nick Charles, one of Hammett’s PIs, but he was probably named more with Marlowe in mind (and, yes, Heart of Darkness is one of the works that Anders alludes to).

The Crime of Julian Wells is a terrific read from one of the masters of modern Gothic.

Never Any End To Paris

Never Any End To Paris

By Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated by Anne McLean

New Directions, 2011

ISBN: 9780811218139

What is the nature of this wondrous book?

Let us get a few bearings to start with.  Although ostensibly a novel, it is presented in the form of a  series of lectures, liberally laden with irony, which take place over three days.  Their subject, the subject of these lectures that is, are the couple of years that the author spent in Paris in the ‘70s, being poor and unhappy and writing his first novel, The Lettered Assassin.  During this time he was also Marguerite Duras’s tenant.

Perhaps, then, this book could best be described as a kind of memoir, an account of how the erstwhile author discovered his vocation as a writer?  As an approximate description this is acceptable, and throughout there are a lot of thoughts and reflections on writing and the writer’s life, and on particular writers as well (Hemingway and Duras above all, since they were in a sense Enrique Vila-Matas’s mentors, but also Beckett, Borges, Perec…) thrown in for good measure.  Yet one should also bear in mind that the author states at one point that he ‘can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity’; so as a memoir it certainly shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Picturesque allusions, literary and arty and cultural (e.g. to rock ‘n’ roll and film) proliferate, and on that score it is a fulsome, extremely entertaining read.  Moreover, it becomes a moving testament when Vila-Matas writes of Marguerite Duras’s last days.  If Hemingway was Vila-Matas’s first literary hero – and reading A Moveable Feast  the inspiration for getting digs in Paris and writing a novel in the first place – then Duras was his unobtrusive supporter, as well as being an accommodating landlady.  And it was she who shoved a sort of laundry list concerned with writing a novel into his innocent hands when he needed it.

Clearly not – and by a long chalk – a conventional novel, Never Any End To Paris is, equally clearly, a novel literary creation, a sparkling gem.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

 

Café Müller by Pina Bausch

Café Müller

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, September 2010

ISBN: 9782851817273

Café Müller was created and first performed in 1978, thirty four years ago: a fair distance in time.  It still lives.

This film of the dance (or the psychodrama, which may be a better description) was made in May 1985 at the Opera house in Wuppertal, then broadcast on German TV in December of that year.  Pina Bausch directed the film and she’s on stage here too, taking the same role that she took in the original production, some seven years before.

It begins with a lone woman dressed in an ethereal gown, edging into a cluttered room.  There is very little space.  Chairs are strewn around and she bumps into them: perhaps she is blind?  To avoid obstacles, to stay safe from pain, she keeps to the wall, clinging to the margins.  The woman is played by Pina Bausch.

Another woman, similarly dressed, enters the room shortly thereafter and goes towards the chairs, which are (most of the time) cleared out of her way by a man.  He watches over and makes a path for her, but he can become impatient with her fumbling. There’s an edge, a possibility of violence or desertion.

You could view the women as two halves of the same whole, or perhaps they represent two choices (to put it starkly, Yes or No) towards life, the world, love, intimacy…

One scene haunts the mind, still.  A man holds a woman in his arms then drops her, whether through tiredness, carelessness or cruelty.  At once she gets up and clings to him.  Again he holds her, lifts her up into his arms but drops her.  And again, after she falls, she stands up and clings to him.  It is cruel, funny, pathetic, indescribably sad – all these at once.  The cycle goes on for so long that eventually you pray for it to end, as all the while Purcell’s mournful aria (‘Remember me, but oh forget my fate!’) drives despairingly on.

Herve Guibert wrote of Café Müller that it leaves you ‘with the heart wounded and bandaged, bathed in an emanation of tears’, which is one way of putting it.  In the same review (it is one of six articles in the booklet that accompanies the DVD) he goes on to explain:

It is not Pina Bausch who wounds the heart; it was already hurt, but the wound had been forgotten, written off as foolish, romantic or narcissistic, and Pina Bausch, through the bodies of her dancers, reminds us of the reality and the vitality of that wound.  (77)

Of course, viewing Café Müller on DVD can never be the same as seeing it live on stage: your eye is curtailed, there are things you cannot see.  Even so, in this form it still has the power to move and one advantage is that there’s time to reflect on its rich meanings.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.