chosen ones and dark lords and everything in between

 

 

To start with, this was mostly about books, and I think it will end that way too. But it begins with a not terribly controversial statement; hero worship is not good. And the greatest figures in the fight for human rights or human progress of one kind or another – Martin Luther King, Jr, Emmeline Pankhurst, Gandhi – without wishing to in any way diminish their achievements – would not have achieved them alone. Rosa Parks is a genuine heroine, but if she had been the only person who believed it was wrong for African-American people to be forced to give up seats for white people, the practice would still be happening. These individuals are crucial because they are catalysts for and agents of change – but the change itself happens because people – movements of people – demand it.

a bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes

This is obviously very elementary and news to nobody, but it’s still worth remembering in times like these, when people seem to be drawn to somewhat messianic figures (or to elevate people who have no such pretensions themselves to quasi-messianic status). One of the problems with messiahs is that when they don’t fulfil the hopes of their followers, their various failures or defeats (of whatever kind) take on a cataclysmic significance beyond the usual, human kind of setback and re-evaluation. It’s only natural to feel discouraged if your political or spiritual dreams and hopes are shattered, but it’s also important to remember that the views and opinions that you were drawn to and which you agree with are yours too. They are likely to be shared by millions of people and the fact that they are also apparently not shared by a greater number in no way invalidates them or renders them pointless.

The history of human progress is, mostly, the history of people fighting against entrenched conservative views in order to improve the lives of all people, including, incidentally, the lives of those people they are fighting against. This obviously isn’t the case in ultimately ideological revolutions like those in France or Russia, which quickly abandoned their theoretically egalitarian positions in order to remove undesirable elements altogether, or the Nazi revolution in Germany, which never pretended to be inclusive in the first place. Hopelessness, whether cynical or Kierkegaard-ishly defiant, is a natural response, but the biggest successes of human rights movements – from the abolition of slavery to the enfranchisement of women to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the legalisation of abortion or gay marriage – have often taken place during eras which retrospectively do not seem especially enlightened; if you believe in something, there is hope.

Rome is a place, but this is mostly about people

But when change is largely driven by mass opinion or pressure – and when we know that it is – why is it the individual; Rameses II, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Lenin, Hitler, the Dalai Lama, Queens, Kings, political leaders – that looms so large in the way we see events historically? Anywhere from three to six million people died in the “Napoleonic Wars” – Napoleon wasn’t one of them, his armies didn’t even win them; but they are, to posterity, his wars. The short answer is I think because as individuals, it is individuals we identify with. We have a sense of other peoples’ lives, we live among other people (sounds a bit Invasion of the Bodysnatchers), but we only know our own life, and we only see the world through the window of our own perceptions.

Sara Shamma self portrait

The artist Sara Shamma – who, significantly has undertaken many humanitarian art projects, but has also done much of her most profound work in self-portraiture – saidI think understanding a human being is like understanding the whole of humanity, and the whole universe” and the more I’ve thought about that statement the more true it seems. If we truly understand any human being, it is first, foremost and perhaps only, ourselves. And, unless you are a psychopath, in which case you have my condolences, you will recognise the traits you have – perhaps every trait you have – in other people, people who may seem otherwise almost entirely different from you. When you look at the classifications humankind has made for itself – good/bad, deadly sins, cardinal virtues – these are things we know to exist because, in varying degrees, we feel them in ourselves, and therefore recognise them in others. Even that most valued human tool, objectivity, is a human tool, just as logic, which certainly seems to explain to our understanding the way the world works, is a human idea and also an ideal. Interestingly but perhaps significantly, unlike nature, mathematics or gravity, human behaviour itself routinely defies logic. When we say – to whatever extent – we understand the universe, what I think we mean is that we understand our own conception of it. It’s easy to talk about the universe being boundless, but not limitless, or limitless, or connected to other universes as part of a multiverse (though not easy to talk about intelligently, for me), but regardless of what is ‘out there’, what we are actually talking about is all ‘in here’, in our own brain; the universe that you talk about and think about is whatever you think it is, however you perceive it.  If what you believe dictates the way you live your life it may as well be, to all intents and purposes ‘the truth’. For Stephen Hawking there were black holes in space/time, and whether or not there actually are, for a creationist there probably aren’t.

This is not to say that there are no actual solid facts about (for example) the nature of the universe; but nonetheless to even prove – to us personally while alive – that anything at all continues to exist after our own death is impossible. We can of course see that it goes on after other people’s deaths, but then I can say with what I believe to be complete conviction that there is no God and that human beings are just (well I wouldn’t say “just”) a kind of sentient hourglass with the added fun that you never know how much sand it holds to start with – but that doesn’t change the fact that a whole range of Gods have made and continue to make a decisive difference to the lives of other people and therefore to the world.

self-empowerment

But whereas that might sound like the background for some kind of Ayn Rand-ish radical individualism, I think the opposite is true; because if any of what I have written is correct, the key part is that it applies equally to everyone. The phrase ‘we’re all in the same boat’ is being bandied about a lot lately for pandemic-related reasons, and it’s only vaguely true as regards that particular situation. We aren’t in the same boat, or even necessarily in the same kind of body exactly, but what we do all share – if broadly –  is the same kind of brain. We are all individuals, and If we are conscious, we are probably self conscious. And given that we live our – as far as we can safely tell – single earthly life as an individual human being, the idea that any of us is powerless during that lifetime is nonsense. When asked to name someone who has made a difference to the world, the first person you think of should be yourself. There would be no world as you know it without you in it, and that is not a small thing; by existing, you are changing the world. Whether for better or worse, only you can say.

Having faith in other people (or even just getting along with them) makes both your and their lives better, but the belief that one particular individual outside of yourself may be the solution to the world’s (or the country’s, etc) ills is worse than feeling powerless yourself; not only because it can reinforce that sense of powerlessness, but because it’s blatantly untrue and (I hate to use this completely devalued word, but never mind) elitist. And it reduces every issue, however complex, to a finite, succeed-or-fail one, which is rarely how the world works. The idea of the hero as saviour probably has about as much validity as the idea of the lone villain as the cause of whatever ills need to be cured. Hero-worship is both logical (because we see the world from the viewpoint of “I”) and also an oddly counter-intuitive ideal to have created, since in reality as we know it, the lone individual may be us, but is largely not how we live or how things work. We have structured our societies, whether on the smaller level of family or tribe, or the larger ones like political parties or nations, in terms of groups of people. But I suppose it is the same humanity that makes us aware of and empathetic to the feelings of others that makes us want to reduce ideas to their black and white, bad vs good essentials and then dress those ideas up in human clothes.

childhood favourites

And so, to books! Reading fiction and watching films and TV, it’s amazing how the larger-than-life (but also simpler and therefore ironically smaller-than-life) hero/ine vs villain, protagonist vs antagonist and – most hackneyed of all (a speciality of genre fiction since such a thing existed, and the preserve or religion and mythology before that) – the ‘chosen one’ vs ‘dark lord’ narrative continues to be employed by writers and enjoyed by generations of people (myself included*), long past the age that one becomes aware of the formulaic simplification of it.

*for people of my generation, the mention of a ‘dark lord’ immediately conjures up Star Wars and Darth Vader/The Emperor, though the ‘chosen one’ theme is thankfully underplayed in the original trilogy. George Lucas doesn’t get much credit for the prequels, but making the chosen one become the dark lord is an interesting twist, even if Lucifer got there first.

Whatever its origins, it seems that people do want these kinds of figures in their lives and will settle for celebrities, athletes, even politicians in lieu of the real thing. Hitler was aware of it and cast himself in the lead heroic role, ironically becoming, to posterity, the antithesis of the character he adopted; Lenin, who by any logical reading of The Communist Manifesto should have been immune to the lure of hero worship, also cast himself in the lead role, as did most of his successors to the present day (and really; to enthusiastically read Marx and then approve a monumental statue of oneself displays, at best, a lack of self-awareness). The Judeo-Christian god with his demand, not only to be acknowledged as the creator of everything, but also to be actually worshipped by his creations, even in his Christian, fallible, just-like-us human form, is something of a special case, but clearly these are primordial waters to be paddling in.

Still, entertainment-wise, it took a kind of humbling to get even to the stage we’re at. Heroes were once demi-gods; Gilgamesh had many adventures, overcame many enemies, but when trying to conquer death found that he could not even conquer sleep. Fallible yes, but hardly someone to identify with. And Cain killed Abel, David killed Goliath, Hercules succeeded in his twelve tasks but was eventually poisoned by the blood of a hydra, Sun Wukong the Monkey King attained immortality by mistake while drunk, Beowulf was mortally wounded in his last battle against a dragon. Cúchulainn transformed into a monstrous creature and single-handedly defeated the armies of Queen Medb. King Arthur and/or the Fisher King sleep still, to be awoken when the need for them is finally great enough.  These are heroes we still recognise today and would accept in the context of a blockbuster movie or doorstop-like fantasy novel, but less so in say, a soap opera or (hopefully) on Question Time. I knew some (but not all) of these stories when I was a child, but all of them would have made sense to me because, despite the differences between the settings and the societies that produced them and that which produced me, they are not really so vastly different from most of my favourite childhood stories.

Partly that’s because some of those were those ancient stories. But even when not reading infantilised versions of the Greek myths (I loved the Ladybird book Famous Legends Vol. 1 with its versions of Theseus and the Minotaur and Perseus and Andromeda*) it was noticeable that, although there still were heroes of the unambiguous superhuman type (in comics most obviously; like um, Superman), in most of the books I read, the hero who conquers all through his or her (usually his) all-round superiority was rarely the lone, or even the main protagonist. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of Christianity (or just of literacy?) but presumably at some point people decided they preferred to identify with a hero rather than to venerate them. Perhaps stories became private rather than public when people began to read for themselves, rather than listening to stories as passed down by bards or whatever? Someone will know.

.*I remember being disappointed by the Clash of the Titans film version of Medusa, too monstrous, less human, somehow undermining the horror

not the original set of Narnia books I had; never quite as good without Pauline Baynes’s cover art

The first real stories that I remember (this would initially be hearing rather than reading) are probably The Hobbit, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – all of which have children or quasi-children as the main characters. Narnia is a special case in that there is a ‘chosen one’ – Aslan the lion – but mostly he isn’t the main focus of the narrative, Far more shadowy, there are books that I never went back to and read by myself, like Pippi Longstocking and my memory of those tends to be a few images rather than an actual story. As a very little kid I know I liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its ilk (also, vastly less well known, The Hungry Thing by Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler in which, as I recall, some rice would be nice said a baby sucking ice). Later, I loved Tintin and Asterix and Peanuts and Garfield as well as the usual UK comics; Beano, Dandy, Oor Wullie, The Broons, Victor and Warlord etc. The first fiction not reliant on pictures that I remember reading for myself (probably around the Beano era) would be the Narnia series (which I already knew), Richmal Crompton’s William books and, then Biggles (already by then an antique of a very different era), some Enid Blyton (I liked the less-famous Five Find-Outers best), Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and Willard Price’s Adventure series. Mostly these were all a bit old fashioned for the 80s now that I look at them, but I tended then as now to accumulate second hand books.

Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain; perfect marriage of author and cover art (Brian Fround and Ken Thompson)
Biggles Flies Undone! Very old even when I was young, I bought this book from a jumble sale when I was 8 or 9

There was also a small group of classics that I had that must have been condensed and re-written for kids – a little brick-like paperback of Moby-Dick (Christmas present) and old hardbacks of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Kidnapped with illustrations by Broons/Oor Wullie genius Dudley D. Watkins (bought at ‘bring and buy’ sales at Primary School). Watkins’s versions of Crusoe, Long John Silver etc are still the ones I see in my head. More up to date, I also had a particular fondness for Robert Westall (The Machine Gunners, The Scarecrows, The Watch House etc) and the somewhat trashy Race Against Time adventure series by JJ Fortune; a very 80s concoction in which a young boy from New York called Stephen, is picked up by his (this was the initial appeal) Indiana Jones-like Uncle Richard and, unbeknownst to his parents, hauled off around the world for various implausible adventures. I liked these books so much (especially the first two that I read, The Search for Mad Jack’s Crown – bought via the Chip Book Club which our school took part in, and Duel For The Samurai Sword) that I actually, for the first and last time in my life, joined a fan club. I still have the letter somewhere, warning me as a “RAT adventurer” to be prepared to be whisked away myself. Didn’t happen yet though.  And then there were gamebooks (a LOT of them), which have a special place here because they fundamentally shift the focus of the narrative back to the direct hero-conquers-all themes of ancient mythology, while also recasting the reader themselves as that hero.

80s Hollywood blockbuster design comes to childrens’ fiction

There were also books I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen but was given at Christmas etc, books by people like Leon Garfield (adventures set in a vividly grotty evocation of 18th and early 19th century London), the aforementioned Moby-Dick, a comic strip version of The Mutiny on the Bounty, a Dracula annual. Also authors who I read and loved one book by, but never got around to reading more of; Anne Pilling’s Henry’s Leg, Jan Mark (Thunder and Lightnings; there’s a moving article about this beautifully subtle book here), Robert Leeson (The Third Class Genie). And there were also things we had to read at school, which mostly didn’t make a huge impression and are just evocative titles to me now – The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler and The Kelpie’s Pearls by Molly Hunter, Ian Serralliers’s The Silver Sword, Children on the Oregon Trail by Anna Rutgers van der Loeff and The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden.  What did I do as a kid apart from reading?

Anyway; that’s a lot of books. And in the vast majority of them, the conclusion of the plot relies on the main character, or main character and sidekick or team to take some kind of decisive action to solve whatever problem they have. Heroism as the ancient Greeks would have understood it may largely have vanished, but even without superhuman strength or vastly superior cunning (even the fantasy novels mentioned like Lloyd Alexander’s which do still have the chosen one/dark lord idea at their heart, tend to have a fallible, doubt-filled human type of hero rather than a demigod) there is still the idea that individual character is what matters.

it’s hard to remember a time I didn’t know these stories

 And this makes sense – something like the ‘battle of five armies’ towards the end of The Hobbit is dull enough with the inclusion of characters that the reader has come to care about. A battle between armies of nameless ciphers (think the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ sans Napoleon) would be hard to get too involved in (cue image of generals with their model battlefields moving blocks of troops about, with little or no danger to themselves). Which is fair enough; after all, being in a battle may feel impersonal, but reading about one can’t be, if the reader is to feel any kind of drama. And maybe this is the key point – reading is – albeit at one remove – a one-on-one activity. Stephen King likens it to telepathy between the writer and reader and that is the case – they think it, we read it and it transfers from their minds to ours. And since reading is something that people seem to think children have to be made to do, often against their will, children’s authors in particular are understandably keen to engage the reader by making them identify with one character or another. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful writers for children from CS Lewis to Enid Blyton to JK Rowling (to name just notable British ones) have tended to make children the protagonists of their books and surround their main characters with a variety of girls and boys of varying personality types. And children’s books about children are (I find) far easier to re-read as an adult than children’s books about adults are. As an adult, even JJ Fortune’s “Stephen” rings more or less true as a mostly bored tweenager of the 80s, while his Uncle Richard seems both ridiculous and vaguely creepy. “Grown up” heroes like Biggles, very vivid when encountered as a child, seem hopelessly two-dimensional as an adult; what do they DO all day, when not flying planes and shooting at the enemy?

the unasked-for Christmas present that began a few years of obsessive game-playing

I mentioned gamebooks above and they – essentially single-player role playing games, often inspired by Dungeons and Dragons – deserve special mention, partly just because in the 80s, there were so many of them. There were series’ I followed and was a completist about (up to a point) – first and best being Puffin’s Fighting Fantasy (which, when I finally lost interest consisted of around 30 books), there was its spin-off Steve Jackson’s Sorcery (four books), Joe Dever and Gary Chalk’s Lone Wolf (seven or eight books), Grey Star (four books), Grailquest (I think I lost interest around vol 5 or 6), then series’ I quite liked but didn’t follow religiously – Way of the Tiger (six books), Golden Dragon (six books), Cretan Chronicles (three books) and series’ I dipped into if I came across them: Choose Your Own Adventure (essentially the first gamebook series, but they mostly weren’t in the swords & sorcery genre and felt like they were aimed at a younger readership), Demonspawn (by JH Brennan, the author of Grailquest, but much, much more difficult), Falcon (time travel) and Sagard the Barbarian (four books; the selling point being that they were by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. They were a bit clunky compared to the UK books). Sudden memory; even before encountering my first Fighting Fantasy book, which was Steve Jackson’s Citadel of Chaos, actually the second in the series, I had bought (the Chip club again), Edward Packard’s Exploration Infinity, which was one of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, repackaged for the UK I guess, or maybe a separate book that was later absorbed into the CYOA series? Either way, there’s a particular dreamlike atmosphere that gives me a pang of complicated melancholy nostalgia when I think of the book now.

lots of books; one hero

Putting a real person – the reader – at the centre of the action ironically dispenses with the need for “character” at all, and even in books like the Lone Wolf and, Grailquest series where YOU are a specific person (Lone Wolf in the former, Pip in the latter), there is very little sense of (or point in) character building. You are the hero, this is what you need to do, and that’s all you need to know. In many cases, the protagonists of the heroic fantasy novels I devoured in my early teens – when I was drawn to any fat book with foil lettering and a landscape on the cover (the standard fantasy novel look in the 80s) – were not much more rounded than their lightly sketched gamebook counterparts. These books often achieved their epic length through plot only; the truly complex epic fantasy novel is a rare thing.

Thanks, presumably, to Tolkien, these plots generally revolved around main characters who were rarely heroes in the ancient mould (though Conan and his imitators were), but were mainly inexperienced, rural quasi-children, thrust into adventures they initially had no knowledge of (Terry Brooks’s Shannara series being the classic Tolkien-lite example). But even when, as in Stephen Donaldson’s also very Tolkien-influenced Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the hero was a cynical, modern human being, or in Michael Moorcock’s deliberately anti-Tolkienesque  Eternal Champion series, where s/he was a series of interlinked beings inhabiting the same role within different dimensions of the multiverse, the ‘chosen one’ vs some kind of implacable ‘dark lord’-ish enemy theme remained pretty constant. But this underlying core or skeleton is only most explicit in self consciously fantastical fiction; whether or not there’s an actual dark lord or a quest, in most fiction of any kind there’s a ‘chosen one’, even if they have only been chosen by the author as the focus of the story she or he wants to tell. Holden Caulfield and Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood have this in common with Bilbo Baggins, Conan the Barbarian and William Brown. But really, what’s the alternative to books about people anyway? Even novels in which people (or surrogate people like Richard Adams’s rabbits or William Horwood’s moles) are not the main focus (or are half of the focus, like Alan Moore’s peculiar Voice of the Fire, where Northampton is essentially the ‘hero’) rely on us engaging with the writer as a writer, a human voice that becomes a kind of stand-in for a character.

classic 80s fantasy cover design

But books are not life; one of the things that unites the most undemanding pulp novelette and the greatest works of literature is that they are to some extent – like human beings – discrete, enclosed worlds; they have their beginning, middle and end. And yet, however much all of our experience relies on our perception of these key moments, that’s not necessarily how the world feels. Even complicated books are simple in that they reveal – just by seeing their length before we read them – the sense of design that is hidden from us or absent in our own lives. Even something seemingly random or illogical (the giant helmet that falls from nowhere, crushing Conrad to death in Horace Walpole’s proto-gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) for example) is deliberate; recognisably something dreamlike, from the human imagination, rather than truly random as the world can be.

What we call history (“things that have happened”) usually can’t quite manage the neatness of even the most bizarre or surreal fiction.  There have been genuine, almost superhuman hero/antihero/demigod figures, but how often – even when we can see their entirety – do their lives have the satisfying shape of a story? Granted, Caesar, stabbed twenty three times by his peers in the Senate chamber, has the cause-and-effect narrative of myth; but it’s an ambiguous story where the hero is the villain, depending on your point of view. Whatever one’s point of view in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, to have sympathy with someone referred to (or calling themselves) a ‘dark lord’ is to consciously choose to be on the side of ‘bad’, in a way that defending a republic as a republic, or an empire as an empire isn’t.

Or take Genghis Khan – ‘he’ conquered (the temptation is to also write ‘conquered’, but where do you stop with that?) – obviously not alone, but as sole leader – as much of the world as anyone has. And then, he remained successful, had issues with his succession and died in his mid 60s, in uncertain, rather than dramatic or tragic circumstances. The heroes of the Greek myths often have surprisingly downbeat endings (which I didn’t know about from the children’s versions I read) but they are usually significant in some way, and stem from the behaviour of the hero himself.  Napoleon, old at 51, dying of stomach cancer or poisoning, a broken man, is not exactly a classic punishment from the Gods for hubris, or an end that anyone would have seen coming, let alone would have written for him. As ‘chosen ones’ go, Jesus is a pretty definitive example, and whether accepted as history or as fiction, he has an ending which, appropriately for god-made-man, manages to fit with both the stuff of myth (rises from the dead and ascends to heaven) but is also mundane in a way we can easily recognise; he isn’t defeated by the Antichrist or by some supreme force of supernatural evil, but essentially killed by a committee, on the orders of someone acting against their own better judgement. More than anything else in the New Testament, that has the ring of truth to it. A significant detail too for those who want to stress the factual basis of the gospels is that the name of the murderer himself*  unlike the nemeses of the ancient heroes, wasn’t even recorded.

* I guess either the guy nailing him to the cross, or the soldier spearing him in the side (much later named as Longinus, presumably for narrative purposes) 

And if Jesus’s nemesis was disappointingly mundane, when on occasion, the universe does throw up something approximating a “dark lord” it doesn’t counter them with ‘chosen ones’ to defeat them either, as one might hope or expect. Living still in the shadow of WW2, Hitler’s messy and furtive end, beleaguered and already beaten, in suicide, somehow isn’t good enough and there are a variety of rival theories about what ‘really’ happened, all of which more pleasingly fit with the kind of fiction we all grow up with. Mussolini was strung up by an angry faceless mob and his corpse was defiled. Hirohito, meanwhile, survived defeat as his troops were not supposed to do, and presided over Japan’s post-war boom to become one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs. The moral of the story is there is rarely a moral to the story. For proof of that, did the ‘heroes’ fare much better? The victors of Yalta lived on to die of a haemorrhage just months later on the eve of the unveiling of the UN (FDR), to be voted out of office, dying twenty years later a divisive figure with an ambiguous legacy (Churchill) and to become himself one of the great villains of the century with a reputation rivalling Hitler’s (Stalin).

Entertainment programs us to view history as the adventures of a series of important ‘main characters’ and how they shaped the world. It’s perhaps as good a ‘way in’ as any – like Frodo taking the ring to Mordor when no human can, or Biggles (almost) single-handedly defeating the Luftwaffe, it makes a kind of sense to us. But the distorted version of history it gives us is something to consider; think of your life and that of (name any current world leader or influential figure; apologies if you are one). If the people of the future are reading about that person, what will that tell them about your life? And what is ‘history’ telling you about really? Things that happened, yes, but prioritised by who, and for what purpose? This is an argument for reading more history, and not less I think. Other people may be the protagonists in books, but in our own history we have to take that role.

Artists (and historians too, in a different way) share their humanity with us, and there are great artists – you’ll have your own ideas, but William Shakespeare, Sue Townsend, Albrecht Dürer, Mickalene Thomas, Steven Spielberg and James Baldwin seems like a random but fair enough selection – who somehow have the capacity or empathy to give us insights into human being other than (and very different from) themselves, but somehow created entirely from their own minds and their own perceptions of the world. But just like them, however aware we are of everyone else and of existence in all its variety, we can only be ourselves, and, however many boxes we seem to fit into, we can only experience the world through our own single consciousness. If there’s a chosen one, it’s you. If there’s a dark lady or a dark lord, it’s also you.

 

 

old books, old eyes, new readings

 

In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That quote popped into my head, in a sardonic kind of way, when I recently re-read the book that was the subject of this previous article, Richard Laymon’s Tread Softly. When reading books you first loved at an impressionable age, time makes Woodersons of us all; it’s the slightly eerie feeling of meeting old friends, only you have aged and they have stayed the same; except of course that in staying the same, they have changed too, because your perspective has changed. What once seemed profound may seem trite, what “you” once related to, you may not; re-encountering your youth – or even more so, your childhood – through books is as complex a feeling as looking at old photographs of yourself can be.

* to be fair to the Fonz, it would be hard for him to have this kind of perspective on the creepier aspects of his Fonzhood since, by the time he was in his 40s, the Happy Days “high school students” he lurked around were themselves in their 30s

What Wooderson specifically draws attention to, and what we are forced to do, is to relate to the things we once liked from the perspective of an older person. And this is where the “genre fiction” comes in. As a teenager, especially from the ages of I think 13 to 17, my preferred reading was, in order of importance, horror, heroic fantasy and science fiction. Recently, in addition to Tread Softly, I have re-read a few books that were among my favourites in my mid-teens (The Rats, Lair, Shrine, The Dark and The Fog by James Herbert, It and Carrie by Stephen King and Weaveworld by Clive Barker) and, for the first time, what struck me about all of them (ego alert) was that I am now older than all of the main protagonists, including the ‘grownups’ in It and the parents in Tread Softly. Which of course is partly because I am now older than the authors of those books were when they wrote them; a strange thought – it’s possibly just me, but I don’t think one ever feels older than an author whose books you read when young, even when their youth is obvious. Not that the age of an author necessarily correlates to the age of their characters, but there seems to be something about the horror genre in particular that makes writers simplify and sketch the main – non-villainous – characters, rather than draw them in vivid detail. Perhaps it’s because some degree of identification with the main character makes the horror more effective, and a certain amount of vague/generic-ness is necessary to make as many readers as possible identify with those characters. I think this is pretty much explicitly what James Herbert did with his ‘everyman’ heroes.

For a variety of reasons, it’s a strange thing to try to engage with your teenage taste in books, far more difficult than it is with music, or with the books one loved as a child. For a start, and with no disrespect intended to the authors, what has to be borne in mind with some of these books is that they weren’t necessarily (or definitely weren’t) aimed at the 14-15 year old who was reading them. When reading childrens’ books, adult me can be – CS Lewis’ Narnia books are perhaps the classic example – uncomfortably aware of the feelings and attitudes – the ‘adultness’ in fact – of the author behind the book. Sometimes – as with Jan Mark’s Thunder & Lightnings (there’s an insightful article about this excellent book here), or the best of Robert Westall’s novels – it gives me a new respect for a writer who until now I was mainly nostalgic about. Other times less so; for all the informative qualities, animal welfare concerns and anthropological information in Willard Price’s Adventure series (which I loved), the core idea of the two wholesome young American boys travelling the world, encountering its cultures with genuine (if occasionally paternalistic) respect and then catching its animals & shipping them off to zoos and safari parks, feels pretty uncomfortable. Far more so in fact than Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, where even child-me was aware of the dated imperialist attitudes and (in Bulldog Drummond especially) almost (or I’m tempted to think actually) parodic levels of jingoistic racism. But Willard Price wasn’t dealing in knowingly crass, simplistic thrills as  “Sapper” was.

childhood favourites

He was a genuinely philanthropic, genuinely respectful, extremely knowledgeable naturalist and social worker and I did in fact learn a lot from his books. But one of the things I learned – and I don’t think it was a bad thing to learn – was that the enlightened attitudes of yesterday, although certainly preferable to the unenlightened ones – are not necessarily the enlightened attitudes of today.

the beginnings of horror fandom? Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual
Julio Vivas’ artwork for The Drowning Pond

My interest in horror was probably first awakened when I was still very much a reader of Biggles & co. I loved the Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual I had got for Christmas when I was (I think) 8 or thereabouts. Around that age I also loved the (vastly inferior 80s) Eagle comic  horror spin-off Scream! (which only seemed in my world to exist as ‘specials’ and never as a regular comic) Nevertheless, various things from Scream!, most notably a somewhat folk horror-ish story called The Drowning Pond with its illustrations of a skeleton with flowers in its long hair is still very vivid in my mind. And here it is!

 

 

Non-comics-wise, I remember borrowing (Doctor Who author) Terrance Dicks’ Cry Vampire! And Wereboy! from the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.

“Zinja” Jesus.

Interestingly (I use that word advisedly, with the caveat; ‘to me’) my interest in gore was parallel to, but not at all dependent on horror. I remember in my English class, at the age of (I think) 12, having to write a story based on Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, and writing, under the influence of Robert Shea’s supremely dodgy Shike: Last of the Zinja books, about ninja rats attacking their enemies and slicing their intestines into ‘spaghetti’. So I was quite ready for James Herbert already.

Herbert wasn’t the first ‘adult’ horror author I read though. I think that was HP Lovecraft, who I came to through two sources he would probably have found incomprehensible. Firstly, heavy metal (he is quoted on Eddie’s gravestone on arguably Derek Riggs’ finest – and certainly my favourite as a child – Iron Maiden album cover, Live After Death (1985)) and I came across him again a little later, through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Not that I played it (though I would have liked to) but as a subscriber to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf  magazine (essentially, I now realise, for the pictures) I became aware of it and my interest in Lovecraft grew.

Derek Riggs’ finest (Iron Maiden) painting? Live After Death (1985) Lots of blue, lots of yellow & a bit of white; genius
Games Workshop’s 80s edition of Call of Cthulhu

Before reading any actual Lovecraft, I’m pretty sure that I borrowed the game itself in its hardback book edition from the local library (this would either be the Rats of NIMH year or the year after). Shortly thereafter I then borrowed (from the same library – Cupar) a hardback edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time and other stories and since then, Lovecraft has been one of the few writers I’ve never ‘grown out’ of, or lost interest in. As such, he fades from this article now except for two more observations; firstly, Lovecraft’s protagonists – sensitive, articulate, terrified – are clearly Lovecraft himself. The author died when only a few years older than I am now, but both Lovecraft and his characters will I think always feel older to me than I do. People – like Michael Moorcock (another teenage favourite) – who don’t like Lovecraft’s writing, usually don’t like the florid style and neurotic tone of his stories – the elements which to me are his real strengths as a writer and make his writing – although widely imitated – genuinely inimitable; no-one else captures that tone. Secondly, that first Lovecraft book I read had no illustration on the cover (on the whole I think Lovecraft has been badly served by artists and illustrators, though I love many of their efforts – and anyway it’s his own fault the illustrators so often fail). but two pictures were instrumental in making me want to read his work; there was the art for a Call of Cthulhu module called Green And Pleasant Land that was advertised prominently in White Dwarf, and a Les Edwards painting (possibly unrelated to Lovecraft in origin) used in the Call of Cthulhu book. (Edwards’ Croglin Vampire*, also used in the book was a superb picture too, though less Lovecraftian*)

Lovecraftian inspirations: the cover of a sourcebook for UK based Cthulhoid adventures (left; still love tentacle-meets-cricket) and a Les Edwards painting used in Call of Cthulhu

*Still very interesting however; read about the ‘real’ Croglin vampire here

So anyway; although I have very shadowy memories of reading the opening of Cujo (I think my mum had it) and seeing the film versions of Cujo and Christine, the first horror novels I remember reading in their entirety are James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and It. I remember an interview in FEAR magazine issue two, James Herbert said that the characters in his novels were ‘everyman’ – and in his early novels in particular, it’s a very specific kind of everyman; In The Rats (1974), we meet Harris, “teaching art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls. Jesus Christ!” and “At thirty two he was back [in the East End], teaching little facsimiles of his former self…” while in The Fog (1975) we find that “At thirty-two, [environmental investigator] Holman was still young enough to be angered by the seeming lack of resolution shown by his superiors when he himself had taken great risks to ferret out the proof they asked him to provide.
Variations on these characters – tough, working or lower-middle class, cynical about the motives of those in charge; thirty two – are essentially versions of the young(ish) James Herbert himself, which is understandable, and they were to appear in the majority of his books until the mid-to-late 80s, when he seems to have become interested in characters with a little more individuality. Those ‘everymen’ – Harris, Holman, Pender, Culver, Bishop – are little more than ciphers, characters made of a few (mostly) well-selected details but overall as relatively simple as the dangers they face – that is, rats, fog, more rats, a fog-like darkness etc.

When the stories get more complex, as with The Spear, The Jonah and the aforementioned Shrine, it’s noticeable that the characters do too. In Shrine, the hero, Gerry Fenn is actually younger than usual (29) but even more jaded; a wannabe tabloid journalist(!) who we first meet “tired, angry and a little drunk” and ranting about “rent-a-left” loonies. As a teenager I took James Herbert’s statements about politics at face value (this isn’t quite a quote but I’ll keep the inverted commas as what he said in that issue of FEAR was definitely something like “I’m not anti-right, I’m not anti-left, but those in power always look after themselves”). Now – especially after reading his final novel Ash (2012) perhaps the most unintentionally funny book I’ve ever read – Herbert’s apparently apolitical stance seems – like his everyman character and his ‘have your cake and eat it’ attitude to sex (describe it in titillating detail but punish the characters who indulge in it illicitly) – pretty reactionary, although his point about the powers that be is of course a valid one. But still; maybe the strangest thing about reading James Herbert as an adult is not the paranoia about what governments get up to, or the preoccupation with violent death; it’s that supposed everyman. I guess as a young teenager I saw him/them as simply ‘an adult’, but as an adult – and an older one than most of those characters are – I see him/them as… a bit of an asshole really, which mars the enjoyment of the books a little for me. But maybe just for me; possibly ‘everyman’ really is a centre-right-to-borderline-fascist asshole. Complicating things further, sometimes – as in Shrine and especially some of Herbert’s later books like Creed – it seems like we are definitely supposed to view the character as unsympathetic/unpleasant, which is odd in that it diminishes the effect of the horrors they experience to some extent; the effect is a little like those ‘ghost hunters’ type of TV shows, where noisy, aggressive people blunder around in the dark taunting spirits for not showing themselves and then scream like hysterical children at the least noise or drop in temperature; good.

icons of 80s horror

By contrast, Stephen King is interesting, in that the book that made his name – Carrie – has no hero at all to speak of, just Carrie herself, and the impersonal voices of the various documents that tell her story. As a teenager I wasn’t very keen on the book and found it, despite its brevity, far harder to read than It. I don’t think I really understood its popularity either. Reading it now, I find it far more impressive and effective, maybe because as a teenager, King’s insight into teenagers and their lives seemed unremarkable (ie I literally didn’t give it any thought) whereas now I think it’s one of the key features of almost all of his work that I like the most. In Carrie, as in It, the vividness of the horror is increased by the framing of the story. In It the story is being told “now” (although now is obviously the 80s) and segues into the 1950s sections in a self-consciously cinematic (or televisual) ‘flashback’ kind of way, whereas in Carrie, we know right from the beginning that Carrie’s story has already ended and become history. Although that sounds like it should have a distancing effect, what it actually does is give a feeling of reality. We don’t so much empathise with the characters as look on at their plight – but King is a good enough storyteller to engage the reader’s empathy without having to put them directly into the characters’ shoes.

Stephen King and James Herbert both brought a sense of modern-ness to the horror genre in the 1970s (not that they were the only ones, but for me they were the most important for the 80s horror fiction explosion, Herbert possibly less so in the USA), but they did so through almost opposite means. Both abandoned the gothic/melodramatic/romantic element of horror that had been at the genre’s heart, but after that, they part ways. Herbert is modern via the immediacy of his bluntly explicit descriptiveness; a very 1970s matter-of-factness; cold, harsh and almost industrial (the Throbbing Gristle of horror literature maybe?); horror with no politeness. Carrie, has a cold, clinical, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s entirely unlike Herbert’s – it isn’t about the viscera. With The Rats, James Herbert was telling a nasty story, as vividly and convincingly as he could, to make it feel real. With Carrie, Stephen King heightens the reality by saying this isn’t a ‘story’ at all; this is what happened. As a teenager I mostly preferred James Herbert, but as an adult I find that Stephen King is far easier to enjoy. From the adult perspective, King’s teenagers are still teenagers; in fact even more so than they seemed at the time; whereas Herbert’s adults are ciphers, or in his more developed characters, people who on the whole I just don’t like.

Although I mentioned James Herbert, Stephen King and Clive Barker as a kind of trinity of 80s horror in my Richard Laymon article, Barker is and always was the obvious odd man out of the trio. Firstly because – with a few exceptions – the standard idea of ordinary people encountering horrible things isn’t his primary kind of story. In fact the idea of ‘ordinary people’ isn’t one that I associate with Barker at all; not because (as far as I can tell) he is dismissive of everyday kind of characters, it feels more like he just doesn’t really believe in them. In Weaveworld (1987), the hero is to all intents & purposes ‘ordinary’ – “His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he’s universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre.” We first meet Cal trying to catch an escaped racing pigeon. A working class Liverpudlian in the 80s seems the very epitome of ordinariness, but as his name indicates, there’s always something a little otherworldly about Cal (even compared to for instance, the villainous, magic-using  Shadwell, who fits in in Cal’s prosaic world far more easily than Cal himself seems to). I can’t remember if I felt this way about Cal, or the book itself when I first read it (another library acquisition I think, I certainly read it at the time of its first paperback edition if not before). He seems a younger, stranger character than I remembered; but then the whole book feels stranger. Not so much the overtly fantastical parts, but the Liverpool-set opening chapters.

Without thinking much about it, I had always assumed that Weaveworld was set “nowadays”, i.e. in the late-80s, when it was published, but there are odd mentions, such as the police arriving in a ‘Black Maria’ – I don’t know when the UK police stopped using black vans, but I know that even in my earliest recollections (late 70s/early 80s) they were white – that make the Liverpool Barker describes feel both specific and vaguely unreal. Is this intentional? Clive Barker grew up in working class Liverpool himself, in the 60s and 70s, but was not much older than Cal Mooney when writing Weaveworld (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he started writing it when he was 29 in fact). And yet;  I remember seeing him on TV around the time the book was published and being surprised at his relative lack of a Liverpool accent; perhaps because of his background in theatre and experimental filmmaking he seemed at ease on television, but always has a hint of the otherworldly quality I associate with his work. Weaveworld  has been ‘in development’ in Hollywood for years, but I’d say that unless they can somehow go back in time and get the young Clive Barker, the production will never have the right Cal Mooney. In fact this 1988 interview with both Clive Barker and James Herbert could almost be with “Mooney” and “Harris” and probably tells you everything you need to know about the differences between the two authors’ work; If Harris, Holman et al are James Herbert and the gritty urban settings of London and its environs are their natural habitat, then Cal Mooney equally is Clive Barker, and ghost-Liverpool and the magical world of The Fugue is his. And I’m not sure either author had it in them – at that time at least – to write convincingly about the world of the other, even if they had wanted to.

So what of it all? I don’t know; are there conclusions here? Reading favourite teenage books is like visiting your school long after you left it – everything is familiar, but smaller than you remembered. Genre fiction is by its nature somewhat generic, and is largely plot, rather than character-driven. Lovecraft again is an exception, because somehow his stories manage to be neither plot, nor character driven, so much as they are perspective-driven; sometimes the horror, omnipresent in his best work, has very little narrative to fuel it, just a tone of voice. The heroines and heroes of most of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi I used to devour as a teenager were mostly there as stand-ins for the reader, or for the writer. Most horror authors whose careers last any length of time start to write novels about writers, just as successful musicians start writing songs about being on tour. Going all the way back to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, the villains in horror have always been more memorable than the heroes (actually, Frankenstein is more complex than just hero/villain, but I’ll stand by it), in the 80s with horror cinema this becomes even more noticeable…

At some point a real conclusion will come to me and I’ll add it here; until then, the thing I love about these stories? I get older, they stay the same age.

 

The Vanishing Everything of Everywhere; Goodbye 2017

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…” When The Bangles covered Simon & Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter in 1987, the song was 21 years and one month old, now The Bangles’ version (from the underrated – according to me – movie of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero)  is 30 years and one month old; time flies, another year draws to an end etc etc etc. It took until the early 90s for 60s nostalgia to really take hold and, true to form 30 years on from the 1980s, 80s nostalgia is everywhere; in music, in fashion, (especially) in film and television. Even the tired, terrifying old tropes of the cold war are back; excellent stuff.

It’s approximately 90 years since HP Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” (in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926-7)), and it’s got to be something like 25 years or so since I first read those words (in the HP Lovecraft Omnibus Vol 2, Dagon and other Macabre Tales, Grafton Books, 1985, p.423 ). So what about it?

Lovecraft might well be right about fear; but more pertinent to my intro is that perhaps the oldest emotion preserved in literature – at least (major, major caveat, based on my ignorance) in the literature of Europe – is nostalgia, and the feeling that things were better in the past. (see also here for an excellent & thoughtful look at nostalgia) The literature of the ancient Greeks makes clear that the age of heroes already lay in the distant past; the pride and arrogance of Imperial Rome was tempered – formally, at least – by the belief that it was a pale imitation of the Republic which the Empire supplanted. The earliest literature in (old) English makes it clear that the inhabitants of what was one day to become England were a) not entirely sure of what had come before, but b) knew that it was in many ways ‘better’ and certainly more impressive than the present day of the 8th century:

“The work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,/ mouldereth…
And the wielders and wrights?/Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone”

The Ruin, (Translated by Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics (3rd edition, 1991, p. 2)

Even closer to home (for me), the earliest literature of Scotland, the Goddodin of the poet Aneirin, dating from anywhere from the 7th to 10th century and originally, it is presumed, written – or at least passed down – in the ancient British language now called Old Welsh (which it is of course, but it is also, geographically, old English and old Scots, since it seems to have been spoken in a far wider area than modern Wales). The Goddodin is a series of elegies mourning the loss of the warriors of eponymous ancient kingdom (which spread roughly over what are now the modern Scottish regions of Lothian and Borders) in battle, and with them the heroic culture of the era.*
To say that nostalgia as opposed to fear may be mankind’s oldest emotion is problematic, both logically (chicken/egg innit), and because for all of its obviously dominant ingredients – sadness/regret and happiness –  a large component of nostalgia can be fear, and, specifically, Lovecraft’s ‘fear of the unknown’ (in this case the always unknowable future). This is problematic for many reasons; in the examples noted above, the glamour (not intended to have its old, magical meaning, but actually that is probably even more appropriate) attached to the past is partly because it can’t come again. If the people of ”now” are as noble, heroic etc as the people of “then”, then somehow the past – and the ancestors, a vital component of the values of most non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures – is not receiving its due reverence.

*this theme even crops up in a very similar form in the Fortinbras subplot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, preserved at one remove from the earliest known version of the story, Saxo Grammaticus’ elemental/mythological 13th century version from his Gesta Danorum. But even this is assumed to be derived from an earlier, lost source, probably Icelandic. 

Although it seems almost incomprehensible to someone of my generation, there seems to be a similar, ‘don’t disrespect the ancestors’  unease nowadays in the unwillingness in some circles to condemn wholesale the expansion/existence of the British Empire. And really, it’s not complicated  – it is entirely possible to be impressed by and/or grateful for the innovations of the Victorian era – flushing toilets, railways and whatnot – while seeing the culture and times for what they were; repressive, oppressive, misogynistic, racist, ignorant. It shouldn’t be difficult, because it’s happened before, more or less. Christianity made it easy for previous ages to condemn the pagan empires of Rome, Greece, Egypt and co (and indeed the ancient Arabic civilisations) without abandoning the inventions and innovations of those civilisations. Indeed, even at the height of Christian belief in Europe, interest in the cultures of the pagan empires remained high, even if Christian scholars felt the need to inflict a version of their own value system onto their researches. There’s no reason that people now shouldn’t be able to do the same with the ages we have left behind, or are hopefully in the process of leaving behind. Yes, good things come from bad, but not because of the bad, but because (most) human beings are extraordinary.

In 2017 there seemed to be – as I suppose there always must be – an ever-increasing number of warring nostalgias and counter-nostalgias, the latest being for the Russian Revolution in 1917 – a violent event, with vast and oppressive consequences and therefore definitely negative, but like most revolutions, born of aspirations and ideals which are hard to dismiss. In fact, Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale Of Two Cities seems uncannily prophetic, because Dickens – as he explicitly realised – could see that human nature and human actions remain fairly constant:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”

I think it’s probably true that it’s always the best of times, for somebody, in some respect, it’s certainly always the worst of times for others; which sounds complacent or at least fatalistic, but only if one doesn’t try in some way to improve things. This kind of impersonal nostalgia – for ‘better’ times – is, necessarily selective. (in fact, all nostalgia is, because perception is selective – hmm, it seems like this just started copying the thing about realism I wrote recently, but bear with me) and relies to a large degree on ignorance and/or self-deception in order to be nostalgia at all.

History isn’t a subject, history is everything; people, peoples, cultures, societies, but, necessarily “history” as taught, or absorbed through popular culture, filters and simplifies, to the point where some people in Britain still talk nostalgically about ‘Victorian values’ without (usually) intending any reference to the exploitation and subjugation of untold millions of people, child prostitution and child labour, the life expectancy of the average Victorian person etc etc etc. And, as always, history is more complex than its popular image. The era may be symbolised for British people by the building of railways or the expansion of the Empire, or by Jack the Ripper, or Queen Victoria being unamused, or by the establishment’s treatment of Oscar Wilde; but it was also the era that produced and shaped Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria and of course, Wilde himself, as well as the whole decadent movement. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud was only two years younger than Wilde; an apparently value-free but perhaps significant observation…

This kind of complexity is what makes history more interesting than it’s sometimes given credit for; the Scottish Enlightenment was a wonderful, positive, outward-looking movement, but it coexisted in Scotland with a joyless, moralising and oppressive Calvinist culture. Time and nostalgia have a way of homogenising peoples and cultures. The popular idea of ancient Rome is probably one of conquest, grandeur and decadence, but what is the popular idea, if there is one, of ‘an ancient Roman’? Someone, probably a man, probably from Italy, in a toga or armour; quite likely an emperor, a soldier or a gladiator, rather than say, a merchant, clerk or farmer. Even within this fairly narrow image, a complex figure like the emperor Elagabalus (Syrian, teenage, possibly transgender) defeats the obvious school textbook perceptions of ‘Romanness’ (as, perhaps, it did for the Romans themselves). Even in our own time, the fact that older generations from the 60s/70s to the present could lament the passing of times when ‘men were men & women were women’ etc is – to say the least – extremely disingenuous – presumably what they mean is a time when non-‘manly’ men could be openly discriminated against and/or abused and women could be expected to be quiet and submissive.* Similarly, throughout my life I have heard people – and not exclusively right-wing people – talk about the economic success that Hitler brought to Germany; but you don’t have to be the chairperson of a financial think tank to see that a programme of accelerated militarism that requires war in order to function isn’t really a viable economic model for anyone who doesn’t also espouse the ideology of Nazism. But a strange kind of nostalgia dictates that if it wasn’t for all those pesky Nazi faults he could have been a great leader. He couldn’t, though, because he was a real person, he did the things he did and therefore he wasn’t a great leader.

*throughout this article I have been referring to ‘people’ and ‘humankind’ in what is intended to be an inclusive kind of way, referring to people of all races, genders or indeed lack of gender. I admit I have probably referred to gender in a binary sense, partly no doubt through laziness. However, I do have a tendency to  not use the term ‘cis’, unless necessary – for me personally, the word ‘women’ includes trans women and the word men includes trans men. I don’t intend any offence by this, but I also don’t really mind if anyone is offended. I think it’s a shame that something as basic (if not simple) as a person’s gender should be a matter of opinion, but so it seems to be. My own view is that the contents of someone’s underwear is none of my business unless they explicitly make it so.

As I’ve said at least one too many times, history is complex,  but nostalgia, despite being impossible to sum up in a single word other than itself* has a simplifying quality. Nostalgia is safety – political reactionaries always look to the past for ideas of stability – but that is only because the past itself is stable, in the sense of being unchangeable. As we see daily, though, although (until the invention of the time machine) it is unchangeable, history, through endless re-interpretations and re-evaluations and new points of view, isn’t really ‘stable’ at all –  and I think it’s fair to assume that (as Dickens implied) every ‘golden age’ masks a dark age. And although it mainly seems otherwise, people are, by and large, fairly positive, they want to look back with fondness, even if it’s a melancholy fondness. There’s a quote from the great Scottish singer/songwriter Alex Harvey that strips away the soft-focus effect that the distorting lens of nostalgia imposes on history:

“Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” (quoted in Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots From The Hip, Penguin Books, 1991, p.71)

This is, I think, indisputably true; but evidently I am wrong – people are entirely capable of being nostalgic about almost any negative event. ‘The Blitz Spirit’ is remembered fondly in Britain because the blitz ended  years ago and all of its bombs already fell and lots of people survived it. It’s hard to make a film about the past without an element of nostalgia, especially when the film is played out as a thriller or adventure of some kind. But even leaving aside war movies and the old fashioned western film, there is and has been in recent(ish) times a whole sub-genre of ‘elegiac’ Western movies which, by and large, focus on the dying days of the ‘old west’ while barely acknowledging the genocide and horror that is the historical backdrop of the period. In a way, that’s fair enough – those stories are not about that subject – but when there are not only no (or very few) films about that subject, and it is barely even acknowledged by ‘official’ narratives of taught history, it’s a stark and telling omission.

*though interestingly, its original Greek meaning ‘homecoming pain’ is more specific than the word itself has come to be in English, and most of the European languages tend to use variations of the word ‘nostalgia’ rather than having their own word with the same meaning) 

It’s my personal feeling that nothing good is produced by adversity; which is not to deny that people are amazing, resourceful, resilient and inspiring; they are. When I said before that every golden age masks a dark age, it’s probably true too that every dark age is shot through with some elements of positivity, although I won’t scrutinise that statement too closely. Countries which were colonised by the British Empire (or indeed any empire) manage to grow and assert and define their own cultures; but we can never know what was lost. I love blues music (and indeed the whole phenomenon of western popular music which mostly grew from it), but again; we can never know what would have been, had these energies not been re-directed by a couple of hundred years of slavery and exploitation. Individuals achieve almost superhuman feats of bravery and resourcefulness etc when facing adversity; escaping from abusers, kidnappers etc. But no-one in their right mind would – I hope – recommend that all young people undergo these kinds of ordeals in order to fully achieve their potential. I don’t think it’s particularly useful for individuals (although governments and institutions are a different thing) to feel guilty about the deeds of the people of the past (or proud of the achievements of the past, really), I also see no need to pretend that, because India has a big railway network, the British Empire did something positive by oppressing the country’s people and culture and stealing its resources. Nothing good came of the British in India. India survived anyway, just as people survive catastrophes everywhere and achieve amazing things in doing so.

Lou Reed and Rachel in 1977 (Mick Rock)

So much for impersonal nostalgia – the personal kind is in many ways very similar, if less destructive. I’ve always been a nostalgic person; both for things I don’t remember, or that were long before ‘my time’ (you name it; silent movies, the 1960s, the Weimar Republic, Hong Kong cinema of the 70s, the Northern Renaissance, the Scottish Enlightenment, 80s teen movies) and, more naturally perhaps, within own experiences. One of the things that initially made me write this was a reference in Anthony DeCurtis’ biography Lou Reed – A Life (John Murray, 2017)* to Reed’s 70s partner/muse Rachel, a fascinating figure who seems to have vanished into history. In googling her I discovered various sites about vanishing/vanished aspects of New York and, because old photographs are endlessly fascinating, somehow segued from that to the vanished Jewish East End of London and the vanished and vanishing everything of everywhere. But as irretrievable as Jewish East London of the 60s and the underbelly of 70s New York are, one’s own childhood is equally as irretrievable, not that one wants to retrieve it, exactly.

* An excellent book, but one which illustrates some of my points; while Lou Reed spent most of his adult life complaining about his conservative 1950s childhood, DeCurtis himself has a more rose-tinted view of the period, saying “In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day…and none of Reed’s friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias” (p.14) – fair enough, except that he also says, ‘Richard Mishkin was a fraternity brother of Allan Hyman’s in Sigma Alpha Mu, a so-called Jewish fraternity because at the time Jews were not permitted in many other fraternities.” (p.36)

Most of the polaroids etc that make up the ever-browsable Internet K-hole appear to be American, but any child of the 80s will recognise the texture and aura of the era we grew up in. When George Orwell wrote (I think in The Lion and the Unicorn, but I might be wrong; I’ll check) – “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person” he was putting his finger on one of the strange paradoxes of culture, heritage and nostalgia. The memories I have of the 80s are made up of a distorted, child’s-eye view of events and culture which is truly mine, plus things I know now that I didn’t then, other peoples’ memories, TV, films. The most potent sources of nostalgia seem to be – as the makers of shows like Stranger Things and Dark, and films like Super 8 and (too many to list) are very aware –  the things you didn’t notice that you had noticed, the most ephemeral details; jingles from adverts, fonts, packaging, slang.

And this is right, I think. The fleetingness of things remembered has nothing to do with their power as memories. I have no idea what the first horror film I saw was, but I do know that a scene on some TV show where skinheads (or possibly a single skinhead) glued a man’s hands to the wall of a lift/elevator scared me as a child and stayed with me for a long time; maybe because I used to see skinheads around on the streets (you had to watch the colour of the laces in their Doc Martens to see if they were ‘bad’ skinheads or not – though they were probably kids too, I now realise). I also know now (but didn’t then) that these were the second wave of skinheads, which is why I also saw Oi! written on various walls around the town; at the time I don’t think I ever made the connection. Again, when one thinks of the impact of very small occurrences it shows how impossible a really objective view of history is. I no longer bear any high school grudges, but without really thinking about it,  many small and/or random sneers and insults from my youth have stayed with me in vivid detail, along with the people and places involved. Similarly (but nicer) I will eternally feel grateful to two beautiful black girls in Camden in (I think) 1990 or 91 who made remarks to me which, even at the time were, at best ‘not politically correct’ but which pleased me immensely; it is among the very few teenage memories that boosted rather than eroded my confidence; a tiny thing, barely even an ‘incident’, but a big deal to a painfully shy adolescent. What to make of such a minor, slightly embarrassing (especially at the time; I can still vividly remember – although it was not a rarity – my whole face burning when I blushed. People often remarked on the redness of my blushes. I remember – not even slightly nostalgically – being compared to a tomato, being told I looked like I would ‘burst’ etc) episode? Nothing, except that real nostalgia, unlike the nostalgia industry (“it was the 70s; Buckaroo!”, to quote Alan Partridge) is particular, not general. The Camden episode may include references to youth, gender, race etc, but it has nothing to do with those factors really, and I doubt if the two girls remembered it even days later. These are not the kinds of details which are worthy of a biographer’s attention;  but they define my youth every bit as much as the music I listened to, the sweets I remember that no longer exist, or the clothes I wore.

To me, 80s nostalgia  has less to do with “the 80s” in the sense it that it appears in TV shows and films as it does a litany of gloomy-sounding things: the urban decay of 60s and 70s council estates, indoor markets, army stores, arcades,  brutalist churches that harmonised with the concrete towers  that the fire brigade used for practise. This is a kind of eeriness as nostalgia; reflected in my liking for empty streets and art that represents empty streets: Algernon Newton, Maurice Utrillo, Takanori Oguiss , the photography of Masataka Nakano and taken to its extreme, Giorgio de Chirico, where the emptiness isn’t empty so much as  it is pregnant , reminding me always of  – nostalgia again – the ruined city of Charn in CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew (by far my favourite Narnia book) – which made a huge impression on me as a child – and may be where my liking for such things (including ‘urbex’ photography, like that of Andre Govia, and of course, The Ruin, quoted way back in the first paragraph) comes from.

The Red Tower by Giorgio de Chirico
Street scene by Takanori Oguiss

“The passing of time and all of its crimes, is making me sad again” – sadly, one of those crimes is that when I first heard that line (from Rubber Ring by The Smiths) in 1989 or thereabouts, Morrissey seemed to be on the side of the downtrodden and marginalised, whereas now he seems to be one of that increasing number of people who pretends that the mainstream of British culture is itself somehow being marginalised; which is patently ridiculous. And nostalgic, of course. And there’s a whole culture industry with its own cultural shorthand, to bolster the standardised view of any given period; especially now, when a decade can be summed up by a b-list cultural commentator or celebrity who clearly isn’t old enough to remember some of what they are talking about, saying “‘e were mad, weren’t ‘e?” about some figurehead of the era. Not so great of course, when said figurehead turns out to be Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, at which point even nostalgia, like history, has to be revised.  But, as endlessly mentioned above, the beauty of all nostalgia is that it’s selective. The 70s that Morrissey seems to  feel nostalgic (in the true, mixed feelings sense) about (witness the whole of Viva Hate, which I love) wasn’t ‘better’ than nowadays, but the writer of its songs was young then. He isn’t now. There are younger people who are also nostalgic about the 70s, or the 80s, because they see the partial versions of the era(s) preserved by those who were there then, or who pretend to have been. The people who mourned the loss of the blitz spirit mourned it because a) they were younger then, and b) they survived it, and told people about its spirit. The people who are nostalgic for the Empire will (hopefully) never have to deal with being in charge of a mass of powerless, subject people whose resources they are stealing (or be the subject of the same), but they can enjoy the things it brought to all of our lives; the wealth of the Empire which, like the mythical ages of Greece and Rome, and the giants that the Anglo-Saxon poet pondered over only exist now as the faded, distorted memory of a faded, distorted memory. Like the 70s, like the 80s, like 2017, like yesterday, they are wonderful and terrible because they can never come again.

Happy New Year!