For most of 1928, James Joyce’s attention was unequally divided among many projects and complications: He was keeping a wary watch over German and French translations of “Ulysses,” his 1922 novel; readying sections of his next novel, which was still officially titled “Work in Progress” (published as “Finnegan’s Wake” years later, in 1939); defending “Work in Progress” from negative reviews and letters from friends who were urging him to quit his experimental writing; explaining to his patrons when new sections of “Work in Progress” could be expected so that he could have an income; and losing his eyesight.
He was 46 years old, living in Paris with his partner, Nora, and their two children, and life was complicated. He was engaged in writing the novel that became “Finnegan’s Wake,” and his artistic ambition for it and its effect on him were both unsparing. “Ulysses” tells a story of a single day, June 16, 1904, in a particular place, Dublin, using as many types of storytelling and modes of rhetoric as he could use. Joyce intended “Work in Progress” to do the same thing but for the idea of nighttime; it is entirely inside the sleeping and dreaming mind of some unknown person, and it is written in a sort of pidgin English animated by puns.
His letters to his patrons tended to obscure matters even further and made it more challenging to continue funding his project. In one 1927 letter to his most important supporter, Harriet Shaw Weaver, he wrote something with “the intention of enlightenment,” as his biographer Richard Ellmann cheerfully puts it, but what he sent read:
I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes, of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mooks and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square. (Ellmann, 597)
Weaver tried to get in the spirit of his constant riddling and urged him to square the wheel, a suggestion for which he thanked her but further explained that he was doing something different than that. By 1928, financially and artistically discouraged, he declared to one friend
Critics who were most appreciative of “Ulysses” are complaining about my new work. They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly, without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these twenty pages now before us cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit.”(Ellmann, 598)
Thus, Weaver traveled from London to Paris in 1928 to see for herself how things were going, on the occasion of Joyce’s 46th birthday. The visit reassured both parties and later that year he received word of an advance payment from two American publishers.
This is the James Joyce captured in Berenice Abbott’s famous portrait of the artist: At rest and a bit more confident in his world. The left lens in his eyeglasses is shaded, evidence of the ongoing battle to save his sight. It is one of the two or three most famous photos of the author, the one fondly parodied on the album cover for “If I Should Fall From Grace with God”:
Abbott was an American who became more famous in later years for her portraits of New York City during the Great Depression. She spent the decade of the 1920s learning her craft, working with the photographer Man Ray, and opened her own studio in 1927. She had photographed Joyce before, in 1926, and that photo session saw the author wearing an eye patch after surgery (and a soul patch under his lower lip):
Joyce apparently liked sitting for Abbott, as there are several other photos from the 1928 session, without the stylish fedora and cane, but obviously from the same session, as he is wearing the same striped necktie. I think the one at left captures Joyce with more feeling; perhaps without the protection the hat and cane afforded him he let his guard down. The iconic photo of an iconic literary figure is followed by a photo of a weary, but not wary, momentarily confident, 46-year-old artist.
* * * * James Joyce died 74 years ago today, January 13, 1941.
____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 13 asks, “Pick a random word and do Google image search on it. Check out the eleventh picture it brings up. Write about whatever that image brings to mind.” When one searches Google Images for images of the great author, the famous Berenice Abbott photo, the one at the top of this column, is number 11.
A young journalist and activist has been in jail since 2012 for the crime of insulting his country’s official religion. Sadly, that sentence can be written about dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers worldwide, but only one writer—one writer that we know about—was publicly flogged this weekend.
This was the very same weekend that government leaders from around the world joined a million-person anti-terrorism march in Paris. The march was the emotional punctuation mark that concluded a sad stretch of days in that city. Days earlier, a group of mass murderers who were deluded into thinking that murder is a religious act massacred the staff of an irreverent humor magazine and killed two police officers, one of whom nominally shared the religion of the killers. The killers and the police officer only shared a religion in name, as the killers believed in murder as an act of faith and the police officer did not.
Raif Badawi is the name of the journalist, and he has been living in a Kafka-esque dreamscape of religion-as-part-of-state-bureaucracy since 2008. In May of last year, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1000 lashes, which are to be meted out in sets of 50 lashes each Friday for 20 weeks. For over a year, his sentence has been publicly changed multiple times between six years and 600 lashes and ten years/1000 lashes while his case bounced between a higher court and a lower court in his country’s legal system.
His country is Saudi Arabia, and as a citizen of the United States, I am aware that I have no say in the legal system or traditions of another country’s bureaucracy; I can only write this column to implore my government to at least say something to one of its allies in the name of a fellow writer and the freedom of ideas. I have written in the past about things I do not like about my country, its use of capital punishment, for instance, and I vote my conscience on these issues, In another country, I might have been arrested for expressing my views, but it has not happened here.
Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, PEN International, and many other organizations have taken up Badawi’s cause, possibly in part because of its clear-cut blatancy: A man is being publicly flogged because he is a writer and has expressed ideas his government would rather he not.
A brief sketch of his journey so far: In 2008, he set up a website, a blog named “Saudi Arabian Liberals,” and he was arrested, questioned, and released. He was then charged with insulting Islam, left the country, was told the charges were being dropped, returned home, and then was blocked from leaving the country again, which is never an indication of good things to come. The web site continued, and he was arrested again in 2012 when a religious leader said that his website “infringes on religious values” and proved that he is an apostate, or one who renounces his religion. Apostasy carries with it a sentence of death, and that legal question—is Raif Badawi an apostate or not?—is what has kept his case bouncing between courts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A lower court declared that it did not have the authority to decide and referred the case to a higher court which decided that the lower court could indeed decide if Badawi is an apostate.
He was cleared of the apostasy charge, which freed the courts to sentence him for the charges he was found guilty of from pretty much the moment he was arrested in 2012: insulting the faith and “going beyond the realm of obedience.” Ten years in prison, 1000 lashes, and a one million riyal fine. And his lawyer, Waleed Abu al-Khair , was arrested and found guilty of setting up a human rights monitor organization, which landed him a 15-year jail sentence.
On Friday, Amnesty International published an in-person account of that day’s flogging:
When the worshipers saw the police van outside the mosque, they knew someone would be flogged today.
They gathered in a circle. Passers-by joined them and the crowd grew. But no one knew why the man brought forward was about to be punished. Is he a killer, they asked? A criminal? Does he not pray?
Raif Badawi had been brought to the square in front of al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah just after midday. There was a huge security presence–not just accompanying Raif but also in the streets and around the mosque. Some roads had also been closed.
Raif was escorted from a bus and placed in the middle of the crowd, guarded by eight or nine officers. He was handcuffed and shackled but his face was not covered – everyone could see his face.
Still shackled, Raif stood up in the middle of the crowd. He was dressed in a pair of trousers and a shirt.
A security officer approached him from behind with a huge cane and started beating him.
Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back. He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain.
The officer beat Raif on his back and legs, counting the lashes until they reached 50.
The punishment took about 5 minutes. It was very quick, with no break in between lashes.
When it was over, the crowd shouted, “Allah-hu Akbar! Allah-hu Akbar!”–as if Raif had been purified.
Raif was taken away in the bus, back to prison. The whole scene had lasted less than half an hour.
A brief cellphone video was made public, and it shows that the punishment is almost as much “a ritualized public humiliation as a specifically physical punishment (though it is certainly that),” as Nick Gillespie of Reason put it. The video is brief, and I hesitated to include it because it is disturbing and because if you go to YouTube to view it, people who comment on YouTube videos can be astonishingly disgusting.
The juxtaposition of a nation publicly flogging a prisoner of conscience and that country sending an envoy to Sunday’s anti-terror march was not lost on one journalist, who Tweeted almost two dozen similar examples of irony:
The Washington Post’s editorial page on Saturday pointed out that those who are outraged have limits on what we can do, since:
The Obama administration briefly on Thursday called on Saudi Arabia to cancel the flogging of Mr. Badawi. On Friday the kingdom ignored the plea and carried out the first of the 50 whippings. So much for strong language from the State Department. It had no impact because it came with no consequences.
The editorial suggested an international investigation into Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, which sounds as toothless as anything that will never happen would sound.
But that is the reality: The U.S. government raised its voice to slightly above a whisper on behalf of one man (not a U.S. citizen) in a different country’s bureaucracy and … crickets. Which is the same non-response our government would give (and gives) if that country formally and diplomatically complained about anything in our system of jurisprudence here.
All I can do as one person, one writer is this: Share the story and some web sites with readers in the hope that someone else will also use their writing voice, their platform. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that last year some 200 reporters were jailed around the world. Many of these reporters are electronic media writers, also known as bloggers, like you and me.
My only hope is that someday Raif Badawi will be able to read the many columns out there like this one and, true to his calling, point out that there are a lot of other reporters around the world who need columns like this one written, marches organized, and petitions circulated about their stories.
____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 12 asks, “Picture the one person in the world you really wish were reading your blog. Write her or him a letter.”
John Cleese has said that for him it often took hours of “grinding” work to write several minutes of comedy, but that Peter Cook could write three minutes of top-quality material in just over three minutes. It appeared to come to him that easily early in his career.
But he did work hard. As a writer and performer, Cook worked hard at avoiding politeness for politeness’ sake if a laugh was available instead. When the Prime Minister of England, Harold Macmillan, wanted to attend a performance of the hot new West End show, “Beyond the Fringe,” either no one told him that one part of the show was the performance of a monologue by Peter Cook as Macmillan and that Cook made Macmillan sound like a sluggish dolt, or it was expected that Cook would skip that section of the performance in deference to the nation’s leader. In the monologue, his Prime Minister reports on a visit with President Kennedy: “We talked of many things, including Great Britain’s position in the world as some kind of honest broker. I agreed with him when he said no nation could be more honest, and he agreed with me when I said no nation could be broker.”
Cook performed the monologue with Macmillan sitting before him and even ad libbed a sentence for the occasion:
When I’ve got a spare evening there’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face.
To Macmillan’s credit, he is reported to have said—years later, mind you—that he felt it was “better to be mocked than ignored.” The audience, and the cast and crew backstage, reported years later that they felt a tense bubble inflate the theater that night as a great grin spread awkwardly across Macmillan’s face: Satire of this sort, the satire that names its object and is delivered in the face of the punchline himself, had not been seen in England in generations, if ever. The era of satire, which we still live in, was born.
Anything that I can biographize about Peter Cook, the brilliant wit and stylish subject of many anecdotes (about Peter Cook), can be found online quite quickly. One fact is this: The end of the story came twenty years ago today, January 9, when he died, age 57. As someone wrote today—and Cook might have said it himself—”it was too old to die young and too young to die old.“
As a writer and performer, he ended on a high note: on December 17, 1993, he was all four guests on Clive Anderson’s talk show, “Clive Anderson Talks Back.” Anderson, the bland-but-game host of the first “Whose Line Is It Anyway” was also one of Britain’s best talk show hosts in the ’90s, mostly because he could play the straight man for his comedian guests. In one tour-de-force hour, Cook was Norman House, a mild-mannered “biscuit tester” who claimed to have been abducted by aliens from “the planet Ikea”; an enthusiastic football coach, Alan Latchley, who summed up his life philosophy as “Motivation, motivation, motivation”; Sir James Beauchamp, a judge; and rock legend Eric Daley, who had a not-very convincing message for young people about drugs: “Don’t do them.”
American audiences were exposed to Cook early, but not often. “Beyond the Fringe” was created to spotlight comedians from Cambridge and Oxford universities. (Both had and have highly regarded amateur theater clubs: the Revue at Oxford and Cambridge Footlights.) Four writer-performers who had become stars in their university stage shows and were probably aware and wary of each other’s work and reputations were thrown together and asked to be funny as a group. Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore were from the Oxford Revue, and Cook and Jonathan Miller were from Cambridge. It was a star-making show for each of the four; to this day, Bennett is a beloved playwright, Miller is a stage director and documentary show host, Moore became a movie star, and Cook became the answer from most comedians to the question, “Who makes you laugh?”
The show was sent to Broadway in 1962 in a foreshadowing of the British Invasion that came two years later. (Four amusing and clean-cut young men in black suits in 1962 were followed by four amusing, clean-cut, and mop-topped young men in black suits in 1964.) “Beyond the Fringe” was the first shot fired in the satirical ’60s; before the 1960s, it was the rare comedian who would dare make fun, even gentle fun, of political leaders in Britain or the U.S. After Fringe in Britain and “The First Family” record starring the sadly cursed Vaughn Meader in America, comedians added satire to their palette.
Comedy is not funny for being ground-breaking, however. One can call the president all sorts of satirical things—and many people do, every day—but if they are not funny things, they are not satirical, either; they are merely angry ejaculations or fussy musings. Beyond the Fringe was funny. In one of the best-known skits from the show, “One Leg Too Few,” Cook and Moore take an absurd premise and visit ever more absurd spots with it. The skit is also an example of the fertile imagination Cook seemed to be born with, as it is one he wrote at age 18 and it was little-revised.
Cook and Moore became a comedy duo on television, radio, records, and film. On television, they co-wrote and starred in “Not Only, But Also” and Cook wrote the film “Bedazzled” for them, and he wrote parts of and starred in one film himself, “The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer,” which did neither. (It was mostly written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman before “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”) Cook and the world learned one thing from his performance in the film: Peter Cook may have been good-looking enough to be the lead in any film, but when an audience can see that the actor does not believe that he ought to be the lead in even one film, and the one film they are watching is it, tickets go unsold. He was neither invited to be—nor asked to be one himself—a star again.
Cook’s 1970s and ’80s were spent as the “world’s greatest slacker,” in his words. Compared to his 1960s, another artist’s busy lifetime might pale in comparison. He earned the chance to slack. In the ’60s, he wrote and starred in a ground-breaking stage show (“Fringe”) and toured the world with it, started up a nightclub that helped define the “Swinging ’60s” in London, started a satirical magazine that is still in business (and whose staff still keeps his editor’s chair empty and awaiting him), wrote and starred in a couple movies, wrote some others, appeared in others, and wrote and starred in several television shows.
In the ’70s, his alcoholism occupied him; he told the talk show host Michael Parkinson as early as 1974 that he drank because he was “bored.” He performed drunk on stage and television in his act with Moore, now titled, “Behind the Fridge.” He quit drinking several times, joined and left A.A., joined again. He watched as his on-and-off comedy partner became a movie star in America (in any profile of Dudley Moore in the ’70s, it was mandatory to use the word “unlikely” in front of “movie star,” but Moore had worked hard at courting Hollywood) and he grew resentful. The duo, “Pete and Dud,” became “Derek and Clive,” an R- and sometimes rated-X-worthy act. For audiences who only knew Moore from “10” and “Arthur,” the recordings seem to be of a different human being. The raunchy (and sometimes drunk and angry) recordings were sometimes banned and many of them were only made public through bootlegs. This short clip is not safe for work, because of copious swearing in its brief 19 seconds.
The Derek and Clive tapes were prized rumors in Britain and the states—the cool guy in college had heard of the Derek and Clive tapes, but the quiet and cool guy had them. (I was neither.)
So the world’s greatest slacker spent his remaining decades appearing in many movies, some of which (“The Princess Bride”) were hits in the United States; re-visited his old skits, with and without Moore; recorded the Derek and Clive albums with Moore; and became a frequent talk show guest, albeit the type of guest who always came on with an idea, which he sometimes let the host know about. It was not at all a low-key performing life, just not a careerist’s one.
One from Mallorca complained, ‘Far too many fish here. Love, Sven & Jutta’; another, from Scotland, insisted ‘Please ignore this card.’ One, from the Hyatt La Manga in Murcia, advised, ‘Re this: please see to that. Suggest you act on this later rather than sooner.’ Another reported ‘We’re at this pesky little place preparing for Team Levy’s Invincible Grand Prix Challange [sic].’
(Both the misspelling “challange” and “[sic]” are Cook’s in that last one.)
Rather than celebrate each birthday by blowing out candles that he was also burning at both ends, Cook kept a smaller creative flame going; it did not seem to interest him as much as it did his audience, which is too bad, but each time he was invited to participate on a television show and an old burned-out shell was expected by the host and audience, the old burned-out shell never materialized. Audiences never saw a Peter Cook who was not verbally brilliant and imaginatively accurate.
Few writers and performers embrace the show business lie, “Always leave them wanting more.” Neither did Peter Cook. His list of “did not writes” is as long as any other human being’s and is similarly useless to think about. The gift of his writing and performing in 35 years in show business is worth celebrating every day. He was funny in more ways—wit, surreal humor, drunken whale national anthems, offensive satire, absurd observations—by himself with four minutes of TV time than entire teams of comic writing staffs with big network budgets often are.
As seen in “It’s a Balloon” just above, his comedy was not cuddly and was often confrontational; he would be ridiculing anyone writing a column like this one. There have been several published today, so he would be busy.
So, twenty years on, goodbye Peter Cook. Here he and the also late Dudley Moore sing their theme song, “Goodbye,” with T-Bone Walker and Peter Sellers.
Abbott was an American who became more famous in later years for her portraits of New York City during the Great Depression. She spent the decade of the 1920s learning her craft, working with the photographer Man Ray, and opened her own studio in 1927. She had photographed Joyce before, in 1926, and that photo session saw the author wearing an eye patch after surgery (and a soul patch under his lower lip):
Joyce apparently liked sitting for Abbott, as there are several other photos from the 1928 session, without the stylish fedora and cane, but obviously from the same session, as he is wearing the same striped necktie. I think the one at left captures Joyce with more feeling; perhaps without the protection the hat and cane afforded him he let his guard down. The iconic photo of an iconic literary figure is followed by a photo of a weary, but not wary, momentarily confident, 46-year-old artist.
The Gad About Town 