The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Iago on the other hand belongs to the new world of the City Comedies; he speaks the language of the streets. Words in his mouth are serviceable; they shift their meaning to suit the occasion, and whatever it is that is being exchanged or trafficked.

  Iago and Othello are in the same play but belong to language worlds that embody different modes of apprehension and different forms of experience. In any meeting between them in which dialogue or argument rather than action is the instrument, Othello is lost.

  Shakespeare’s response to the new City Comedy – which he himself had so brilliantly made way for in the Eastcheap scenes in Henry IV – was not to challenge Jonson, Rowley, Middleton and the rest by taking it up, but to free it of its local setting, its low-life confidence tricks and high-life swindles, and while retaining its sense of the street and its edge of savage humour, make tragedy of it.

  Shakespeare’s audience, or that part of it that had been trained by him to be alert to language styles, and awake, like Iago himself, to the pitfalls that are there to be exploited in the nuances of difference, must have been keenly, comically, anxiously aware of what was in operation here, and seen it as part of the play’s meaning, as well as the source of those fatal misunderstandings that allow Iago to practise his own half-comic, half-sinister form of ‘coney-catching’.

  Fascinating to observe, from the early plays that have survived under his name, how surely the younger Shakespeare grasped what it was in the mix of popular subjects and styles that engaged and challenged him, but more importantly, fitted his temperament.

  He writes, in The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, two machine-like comedies – small masterpieces in their way – then confidently moves on; tries one Senecan tragedy, sees how much or how little of its sensationalism he might make use of, and again moves on.

  What suits him, in the way of comedy, is not at all machine-like; is rather loose in fact, and relies not on situation but on the grouping of characters, high and low, around a set of related questions: love, true or false; love’s language, true or false; love painfully concealed or only reluctantly recognised; uneasy wooing; high-spirited warring between the sexes in which men and women are equal – in wit, in desire, in a sense of their own worth; the whole unified by a poetry, sometimes sad, always tender, sweet but lively, in which Renaissance, Classical, and English folk elements all find a place. Darkness is recognised in the shadow of time and mortality, but the mood is essentially one of reconciliation and fulfilment; open to good-humoured mockery, but with little or no place for corrective judgement or moral or social satire.

  The style had its day, then went out, replaced by a form of comedy that was crueller, sharper, more relevant, more streetwise. What Shakespeare’s form of comedy belonged to was in fact the future: the lighthearted world of the Restoration, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century comedy of manners, and what a later age would discover and call Romanticism. Tragedy, of a kind he will make entirely his own, he comes to obliquely, via the English chronicle play.

  What the chronicle plays offered was a form of national epic. Moving across classes, trades, counties, it bodied forth the nation in all its degrees, all its variety of types and dialects and accents, and was free, in its loose way, to take up a whole range of complex political questions: kingship, order, rebellion, accident, individual destiny; how far ambition in the great, and the needs of ordinary living in the rest, might need to be negotiated in an ever-changing world; how a place could be found, and a case made, for a Richard II, a Bolingbroke, a Gloucester, a Queen Margaret, but also for a Hotspur, a Falstaff, a Jack Cade, a Mistress Quickly, a Fluellen, a Justice Shallow, a Bullcalf. No other playwright of the period has so sweeping a vision but finds so much room for engaging minutiae – for Francis the tap-boy’s ‘anon, anon’, the Bishop of Ely’s strawberries, the voices of Bates and Williams in the night scene before Agincourt, or, within the world of dazzling display and false show that is Richard III, for the still moment that is Clarence’s dream.

  Clarence’s exploration of conscience and the emotional landscape of guilt – as much a matter of feeling aloud as of thinking aloud – has a different pace from the rest of the play he finds himself in. ‘Had you such leisure in the time of death,’ the Keeper asks, ‘To gaze upon the secrets of the deep?’ In pausing to evoke an invisible, interior world, it is at odds with the play’s other more headlong and exterior mode and momentum. Which is why – extraordinary as it is – the scene disappeared so early from the text, and even after its restoration in the nineteenth century was till our own time never played. For Shakespeare it is a key moment.

  What Clarence opens to view, and dramatises, is that inner world of dreams, of irrational doubts and fears, for which we have our own name: the unconscious. Once Shakespeare grasps how it can be used, how it can be fitted into the unfolding action, the possibility is opened for a new kind of play. The action moves within. Into Hamlet’s or Macbeth’s other-world of conscience, of a consciousness ‘sickled o’er with thought’. And that, now, is where the audience is asked to follow.

  What is offered in return is a new closeness: intimacy of a kind that changes what the actor is engaged in from presentation to inward questioning, and the audience’s role from spectator to sharer in the actor’s most secret thoughts. It is when we come to the Dover scene in Lear – Edgar’s moment with his father on an imaginary cliff-top, and the manipulation of Gloucester’s (and the audience’s) vision of it – that we see how far Shakespeare has pushed the notion of ‘action’ on the stage, and how far he expects his audience to take the leap and follow.

  The stage as usual is empty. The audience, again as usual, is dependent on one of the actors to evoke for them, in the word-pictures of which this playwright is the master, an invisible reality, as the Chorus does, for example in Henry V, right down to the ship’s boys climbing on the tackle of sails, and which is what Edgar appears to be doing here when he describes from far off the ‘samphire gatherer’ halfway down the cliff.

  But Edgar is evoking this scene for a blind man, and if the audience takes the usual cue and believes what it is hearing it will, like the blind man, right up to the moment of Gloucester’s leap, be deceived.

  This is an extraordinarily daring piece of play with the usual conventions, and only an audience long skilled in responding and then questioning its response could grasp what is actually happening. At what point, one wonders, did it happen at the play’s first performance, and with how much bewilderment or illuminating surprise?

  We understand all this because the plays have been with us now, familiar and acceptable, for some 400 years, but also because they, and the mind that shaped them, have shaped our minds to receive them: this is our inheritance. The interiorising modern world we take for granted is the one Shakespeare opened to us. What we might see in the Dover Cliff scene is the sort of experience we ascribe now to the pleasures of reading; which is being offered, in this case, to an audience that could not yet read, or have any notion – save in a moment like this – of what that might be.

  One other element of the plays belongs to the future – one perhaps that more than any other humanises and endears them to us.

  Nabokov, in praising the novel, speaks of the place its large form allows to the gratuitous, to what he calls ‘lovely irrelevancy’. ‘What some readers suppose to be trifles not worth stooping to,’ he tells us, ‘is what literature actually consists of … A great writer’s world is a magic democracy where … even the most incidental character … has the right to live and breed.’ He is speaking, of course, of the novel, but what he has to say might equally apply to Shakespeare.

  Consider this exchange, after some talk about corns and dancing, between the two Capulets in Romeo and Juliet:

  Cap. Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet,

  For you and I are past our dancing days.

  How long is’t now since last yourself and I

  Were at a mask?

  Cap 2. By’r Lady,
thirty years.

  Cap. What man? ’tis not so much, ’tis not so much.

  ’Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio,

  Come Pentecost as quickly as it will,

  Some five and twenty years, and then we masked.

  Cap 2. ’Tis more, ’tis more: his son is elder, sir;

  His son is thirty.

  Cap. Will you tell me that?

  His son was a ward two years ago.

  All this, wonderfully touching and real, entirely irrelevant, in the foreground, at the very moment when Romeo is catching his first glimpse of Juliet. In the very next line he stops a passing servant to ask, ‘What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?’ – one of those over-pressed servants who, as the scene opens, are running to and fro as they bring in the dishes:

  Where’s Potpan, that he helps not to take away? He shift a trencher! He scrape a trencher … Away with the joint-stools, remove the court-cubben, look to the plate. Good thou, save me a piece of marchpane; and as thou love me let the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell. Antony – and Potpan!

  Or there are the two stewed prunes (Master Froth having eaten the rest) that Elbow’s wife, being great with child, had a longing for, and which stood, ‘as it were, in a fruit dish’, at Mistress Overdone’s, a dish as Pompey explains, ‘of some three-pence; your honours have seen such dishes, they are not China dishes, but very good dishes’. ‘Go to, go to,’ the exasperated Escalus interrupts, who is the judge trying to make sense of all this, ‘no matter for the dish, Sir.’

  No matter indeed. A trifle not worth stooping to – as Aristotle and his university-trained followers would agree. But it is in just such trifles that the deepest truth of the plays can be found. They let life in; the teeming world of objects in motion from hand to hand that make up the traffic of households, courts, cities. They allow a place for accident and muddle of every sort, and, if only in passing, for the self-absorption and lively self-interest of those who, like the musicians in Romeo and Juliet, are no longer wanted once Juliet has been found dead but have some hope still of the funeral sweetmeats, and though they have, strictly speaking, no part in the action, are nevertheless there, and once recognised, are allowed their moment on the stage.

  What makes all this possible – this indulgence well beyond what might be demanded by ‘art’ – is a form that knows no rules of exclusion; so open to variety and interest that virtually anything can be crammed in and made germane, for the simple reason that it belongs to life. Also, on the author’s part, to an eye, an ear, a mind – to go back to Henry James – on which nothing is ever lost; that takes everything in, and finds a time and place for it, and an audience that has been educated, play by play, into sharing this astonishing receptivity and quickness of response.

  If I come back, at the end, to the audience, it is because there is a continuity between the audience, as he created it, and us, that it would be presumptuous to claim more directly with the man himself; because learning to respond, as they did, to what he asked them to see and feel – to identify for example, as it is pointed out and made real to a blind man, that samphire-gatherer halfway down the imaginary cliff, and to pause for a moment and consider the dreadfulness of his trade – is the kind of small, irreplaceable experience that only he offers us, and which brings us immediately close to him.

  The making of plays was one thing. The re-making of minds to create an audience that would be ready to take them in was another thing again. That audience is us. What we owe him most of all, perhaps, is the capacity he created in us to receive his extraordinary gift.

  Address to the World Shakespeare 2006 Congress

  A COMPANY OF EGOS

  ‘VICTOR HUGO WAS A madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The pungency of Cocteau’s bon mot lies in its dismissal of the most voluble, the most extravagantly prolific French writer of the nineteenth century in a single sentence. Done!

  In nine novels, a dozen plays and more than a thousand poems, Hugo had set out to dominate the language and establish himself, contra Racine, as the true voice of the national literature. It was because he was so much larger than life, in his ego, his output, his sexual appetite, and in the power he claimed as the vehicle of advanced opinion, that he came so close to fulfilling his own notion of himself as the grand intersection of all the century’s lines of force. But the notion was a crazy one, as the century itself was crazy.

  Napoleon, simply by being what he was, had created a new type: the man from nowhere – from Corsica or Tours or Angoulême – who, with none of the advantages of birth or wealth, by sheer force of will, subdues the world to his demands and fashions his own destiny. His career became the prototype for every form of nineteenth-century endeavour. In Balzac’s vast panorama of post-revolutionary France, all the dominant figures, from Rastignac on, have Napoleon as their model – Bianchon is the Napoleon of medicine, Vautrin of crime, Derville of the law. Balzac himself, of course, is the Napoleon of literature.

  If it was Hugo’s madness to imagine he was someone other than Napoleon, it was because he took this ‘someone other’ as embodying more completely than Napoleon had both the spirit of the nation and all the phenomena of the age. For Hugo, the only madness worth aspiring to was to be Victor Hugo. Not for nothing was his crest Ego-Hugo.

  How to write the life of such a monster without being Balzac – that is the challenge. Graham Robb has prepared for it by writing the life of Balzac. His Victor Hugo is an even grander achievement.

  Like Marius in Les Miserables, Hugo was the son of a ‘Brigand of the Loire’, one of Joseph Bonaparte’s Spanish generals with the title ‘Count of Siquenza’. His mother was also a daughter of the revolution – her grandfather had worked with Jean Carrier, the butcher of Nantes, and one of her aunts was his mistress – but she too was a fantasist and bent the facts a little so that Hugo could become, in his mythologising of his life as a national drama, the offspring of opposing political forces as well as opposite geographical regions: father a ‘republican vandal’ from Alsace, mother a ‘royalist Amazon’ from that heartland of Chouan resistance, Brittany.

  In the marital civil war that was the background to his youth, Hugo took his mother’s part, and to spite the general, again like Marius, became a Catholic royalist. But when his mother died just before his twentieth birthday he resumed relations with his father, made a sudden turn in the old Bonapartist direction and began a life-long flirtation with the Left.

  It is Hugo’s early friend, the poet Alfred de Vigny, who provides the sharpest commentary on all this:

  The Victor I loved is no more … He used to be a touch fantastical in his royalism and his religion, chaste as a girl and rather timid too … Now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal … He started out mature and is entering on his youth, living after writing, whereas one ought to write after living.

  Vigny’s portrait allows us a revealing glimpse as well of the young Hugo’s amazing precocity.

  At sixteen, the winner of the Académie Française’s prize for poetry, he was taken up by the court and made himself, through a series of celebratory odes, its unofficial laureate; he became ‘official’ seven years later, in 1825. In a burst of creative energy that has much to do, one suspects, with the pressures of a dedicated virginity, he produced, before he was twenty-one, two works of fiction (the first version of Bug-Jargal and Han d’Islande), 112 articles and two volumes of odes and ballads. Vigny is scathing about Hugo’s method of educating himself ‘by going about from one man to another and helping himself to whatever they have to offer’: Sainte-Beuve, Charles Nodier (from whom the Angel-Victor of the 1820s also picked up his later and rather scabrous bohemian style), his brother Abel. But how else is a young man to educate himself? The point is not what a writer steals but what he makes of it. What Hugo stole on most occasions was the thunder. Hernani was not the first drama to break the rules of unity and play fast and loose with the alexandrine, but it was the one that drew a rag-tag, no
isy audience and created a riot at the sacred site of French classical drama, the Comédie Française. So, too, most of what appears in the preface to Cromwell had already been said by others, but it was Hugo’s rhetoric that made it a classic text.

  By 1830 Hugo, not yet thirty, was at once the darling of a fuddy-duddy court, a Romantic rebel and a budding republican. When his father died in 1831 he refashioned himself as Baron Hugo, insisting thus on his father’s place in the Imperial nobility as opposed to that of the Ancien Régime or the new Bourbons – a distinction essential, as readers of Balzac will know, to the snobberies but also to the ideological affinities of the period. Hugo would get a title in his own right when he became a pair de France in 1845. But by then he was on the way to mystical socialism.

  Robb writes that ‘Hugo’s childhood had not been the plot of a melodrama’, though one might mistake it for one, ‘but a series of contradictory certainties’. This goes some way perhaps to explaining Hugo’s fawning attempts to get himself elected to that Parnassus of literary respectability, the Académie Française, while at the same time plotting, as enfant terrible of the Romantic movement, to destroy it; and why each step he took up the ladder of nobility was accompanied by a sidestep to the Left.

  As for more intimate matters: Hugo’s sexual adventures, once he had offered up his virginity, are legendary. The last remaining connotation of the term Hugoesque in English, as Robb sadly notes, is an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1960: ‘Almost Hugoesque in his unflagging pursuit of maids.’ One suspects that if Hugo’s encounters with women had been recorded in his diary in erotic detail rather than minimalist code, they might rival Walter’s in My Secret Life. He was, like Walter, like Dickens too, a night wanderer, an explorer after midnight of the city’s dark underparts. We also know, because he tells us, that he had his first ‘adult’ erection at nine, and was still noting the phenomenon at seventy-nine; that he took his wife nine times on their wedding night and was once complimented on the same achievement, some years later, by his mistress of fifty years, Juliette Drouet. A speech in the Assembly, he tells us with his usual lack of humour about such matters, ‘is as exacting as ejaculating three times, even four’. His pet name for his penis, nicely marking the correspondence for him between sexual activity and writing, was ‘my lyre’. Yet all the significant figures in his fiction, Frollo, Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Marius and the various young men who die on the barricades in Les Misérables, even Jean Valjean and Javert, are virgins.