The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  How witty would that be, I wonder? We can better imagine how improper. The flirtatious, up-curved mouth, however, certainly looks as if it once adorned an actor – an actor of a particular kind, the kind some of us call a lip-licker. Shakespeare was an actor, but he was probably not a lip-licker. The lip-licker finds the fountain of his expressiveness in the pool of Narcissus. In my forthcoming thesis on the mannerisms of actors (it’s called Ah, Bogie! Spot the reference) I address the question of whether lip-licking is the cause or the consequence of a career gone haywire. David Caruso was already licking his lips in the first series of NYPD Blue. Keen observers didn’t have to wait for CSI: Miami – in which he not only licks his lips but keeps putting on and taking off his dark glasses – to decide that he was out of his head with self-regard. Mickey Rourke had a suitcase-full of collagen injected into his lips in order to give himself bigger lips to lick. As for Malkovich . . . but I don’t want to give too much of my book away. Back to Shakespeare’s Face, a book which has so little to give away that one feels compelled to toss it a bone. Here is the bone.

  The book does have one merit. It assumes, surely correctly, that Shakespeare had ambitions beyond the lonely garret. The sumptuary laws specified plain cloth for anyone not noble. Shakespeare was out for the velvet. Contending with his energy for the right to exalted goods, he was a precursor of the bourgeois world we live in now. The grand total of 480 pictures that have at one time or another been supposed to be of him probably don’t include even a single authentic case, but if there were ten times as many they would scarcely reflect his determination to take his place as a man of the world. Holding to the notion that an artist should be above such things, we can frown on that determination if we wish, but it is very doubtful if he did. So Shakespeare’s Face is not quite as useless as it appears to be at first glance.

  Nor, even, is Harold Bloom’s scholarly new super-squib Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. Less than 150 pages long but somehow weighing like 1,500 pages of pulped railway timetables, Bloom’s booklet engages itself in the doomed task of convincing us that Shakespeare was a great writer, and that Hamlet is a great play. The task is doomed because nobody in his right mind doubts these things. There are even people in their wrong minds who know them to be true. People who think Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth know Hamlet is a great play: that is why they think Queen Elizabeth wrote it. But Bloom thinks we do not understand. He talks to us as if we were wilfully failing to take in an intractable fact. He is a British Airways stewardess trying to tell Liam Gallagher that the bar is closed. He tells us that Hamlet is up there with the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy and Leaves of Grass.

  But is Leaves of Grass really up there with Hamlet? If Bloom can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese, or anyway between cheese and lesser cheese, the deficiency in taste can scarcely be irrelevant to his pretended historical sweep, which means little if it fails to detect points of quality and join them up. From that angle, Bloom ought to be safe with Hamlet: it is, after all, pretty good. But it is less certain that Hamlet is safe with Bloom, or that Shakespeare himself is safe either. Possibly there is a professional deformation that we ought to consider. ‘You cannot get beyond Hamlet, which established the limits of theatricality.’ When F.R. Leavis decided that there could be no completely serious English writing after Lawrence, he allowed it to be inferred that there might be one exception: Leavis. If Bloom is saying that only he fully appreciates Shakespeare, he might also be saying that only he inherits Shakespeare’s capacity to view the world. This is a view of the world in itself, and one that could be hatched only in the dark.

  A star academic can get away with it. Anyone who worked on the outside would be thought to have looped the loop. But really not even Bloom is wholly isolated, because Shakespeare won’t allow it. In front of his class, and even in his study, Bloom is a Shakespearean character, and in his deepest heart he knows which one. He is Falstaff, talking up a storm, pinning Hal to the wall before the world intrudes. His histrionic urge gets him to the party after all. Picking your character is a good place to start with Shakespeare. You can imagine yourself in tights, which helps you to remember that once they had to be paid for, washed and ironed, and that the expense came out of the profits that Shakespeare and his fellow partners were keen to retain intact. In the world of art they created, it was the practical and the physical that made the spiritual so intense. The year after he graduated, Michael Wood played Oberon in a combined Oxford–Cambridge production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All the women in the cast, and several of the men, were enchanted by his elegance of leg. I can remember him now, striding across the stage with his nose pointing at the audience, the boyish portent of a shimmering career.

  TLS, 11 July 2003

  Postscript

  This piece was written too early to catch Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. Though so strong on the background that its hero pales in the foreground, the book survives its cute title. Few critical works on the subject contribute as much. But a good many of them contribute at least something: if not a fact, then a slant of interpretation that looks not utterly invalid in the light of recent history. The question is about what exactly is being contributed to. How much of all this commentary should we have time for? When Greenblatt and I were graduate students in Cambridge in the late 1960s, some of our contemporaries risked failing grades in English by spending too much time acting for the dramatic societies. But quite often they were acting in Shakespeare, and wasn’t every speech they learned by heart worth a hundred pages that had been written about it? The question haunts me still. (I think it still haunts Greenblatt: one of his best qualities.) At gunpoint I would have to say that the study of Shakespeare shouldn’t end with merely memorizing what he wrote: after all, even the question of what he wrote is a subject for scholarship. But it should certainly begin there. J. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet is a classic of scholarship that every student should read, so as to have an inkling of what being a scholar takes. But the student should know Hamlet first, and preferably by heart. It is a matter of priorities. Armed with the memory of a few lines spoken by Cassius and Brutus on the night before the battle of Philippi, for example, I have an answer ready for Harold Bloom’s deafening contention that Hamlet is the greatest play in the world. Yes, keep your voice down, nobody disagrees; but if Hamlet didn’t exist, wouldn’t you have to say the same thing about Julius Caesar? Or, failing that, about King Lear? About Macbeth? About Antony and Cleopatra? There is a special kind of academic madness that wants to get in amongst the great works of art and make itself indispensable by sorting them into some plausible order of importance. In the behavioural paradigm usefully supplied to us by Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, that specific breed of nutter can be hired as a part-time sales assistant, but he must never be left alone to run the store.

  GENERAL ELECTION SEQUENCE 2001

  1. The New Labour Machiavelli

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter Mandelson, ‘but you’re a wizened old media hack.’ He said that to me, and I was flattered out of my wits. The trick of painless teasing is the height of charm, and Mandelson has so much charm that he pays the inevitable penalty: he makes an enemy of anybody from whom he withholds it. For those on whom he confers it, however, only one inference is possible: here is a fine mind. The question of what the fine mind is up to suddenly becomes subsidiary. It was on Tuesday that he called me a grizzled old media hack, and even though our close friendship was scarcely into its fifteenth minute, I had already decided that I had met the political genius I was waiting for – the one who could see that I, deep down, was a political genius too. Since, in all practical matters, I had previously been regarded as a joke figure even by my local residents’ association, this was a late but welcome endorsement of my hidden qualities. But before I draw further conclusions about this historic one-on-one confrontation across Mandelson’s kitchen table in Hartlepool, let us go back to the long-gone day – more than a week ago now – when Tony Blair announced a
General Election clearly fated to confirm him in the post which he could well hold until the next arrival of the Messiah, who will almost certainly be wearing a Labour rosette.

  As you may remember if you are the sort of person who relishes the shower scene in Psycho, the Prime Minister launched his campaign at St Olave’s school in South London. Blair is a man who has a special voice for everything. At the funeral of the Princess of Wales he had a special voice for reading the Bible, as if the measure of its prose needed assistance from himself, with extra pauses, swoops and emphases to eke out its poverty of cadence. At St Olave’s he had a special voice for speaking to children, as if children were a category of human being limited by delayed comprehension. The girl who pulled the sweater over her head was not a political dissident: she was a theatre critic. Two elections from now she might well vote for him, but she will never go to see him playing Hamlet, because she already knows that he will take his doublet off in the opening scene, thus to prove, in his shirtsleeves, that he is a pretty straight sort of Prince. Even the friendliest newspapers thought that Blair’s performance at St Olave’s reeked of stage management. Really this should have been old news. The Labour party has been controlling its leader’s image for years: it’s the Mandelson emphasis, as interpreted in recent times by Alastair Campbell. What made it news in the opening hours of the campaign was a creeping sense that the puppeteers were getting their wires crossed.

  The creeping sense broke into a gallop a couple of days later, when a staged event in a Warwickshire tea room went so smoothly as to defy belief. Fated to go down in the annals of salesmanship as Blair’s Spontaneous Encounter with ‘the ordinary couple in Leamington Spa’, the event featured such ecstasies of spontaneity from Blair, and such paroxysms of ordinariness from the ordinary couple, that any cat in the area would have died laughing. But there were no cats in the area. They had all had their accreditation withdrawn, lest they be caught on camera, rolling around with their paws up in the throes of hilarious death.

  *

  Unlike the Millennium Dome, which achieved incredibility through everything going wrong, the Leamington Spa Spontaneous Encounter Experience achieved incredibility through everything going right. The ordinary couple didn’t turn up drunk and Blair didn’t deliver the script meant to inspire two rehabilitated burglars in Stevenage the following week. But nothing was accomplished except a hefty reinforcement to the growing impression that, for Blair’s management team, efficiency came first, even if reality had to be adjusted to suit the message. The downside to such an attitude is that the manipulation becomes another message. Blair’s protean multiplicity of special voices lends weight to the view that this all-pervading bogusness comes from the top down. When Rory Bremner was thrown off the Labour Battle Bus, it occurred to me that Blair had realized Bremner was really in politics, and had realized it as a consequence of Bremner’s having realized that Blair was really in show business.

  By Friday the media had concluded that Blair’s politics of the fixed smile had lost Labour the first week. The polls didn’t shift, but the perception did. Hague and Kennedy had mixed it with the hecklers. Blair’s minders had allowed him to face nothing more dangerous than a baby. Blair didn’t stop smiling even when he kissed it. The baby could have been scarred for life with the imprint of ivory: the shadow of your smile. ‘He’ll look back on it in years to come,’ said the baby’s on-message mother. Over the weekend, the media consensus was that Millbank’s management of their man was sclerotic in its finesse. The machine Peter Mandelson had helped to create was in a shallow dive on automatic pilot. Already there were whispers that the man who built it might be the only man who knew how to fix it.

  On Monday, Mandelson seemed to agree. He published an article in this paper crying up New Labour’s new emphasis on ‘articulating core values and beliefs’, but he left the way open for his readers to infer that the old emphasis on presentation was still in existence, and perhaps counter-productive. Anyone who recalled that Mandelson himself was largely responsible for the old emphasis might have found this pretty steep, but what mattered was how they might read it at Millbank, where Labour’s campaign was being masterminded by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.

  There were visions of the New Machiavelli driving a wedge between Blair and Brown, as once the old Machiavelli might have warned his Prince against a factotum grown too mighty. At King’s Cross I caught the train to Hartlepool. Or, rather, I caught the first of three trains to Hartlepool. The first train accumulated only twenty minutes of delay on the way to York, and I’m bound to say that under New Labour the quality of public address system announcements has improved out of sight, although unfortunately not out of earshot. The best announcement was when the train was standing just outside Doncaster. ‘We apologize for the slight delay outside Doncaster Station. This is because the driver is on the tracks talking to the signalman about the new speed restrictions. As soon as . . .’

  Ready to vote for Mussolini, I caught the train to Middlesbrough that would qualify me for the train to Hartlepool, but after Middlesbrough my mood changed along with the look of the country. At the Ann Summers sex shop in Middlesbrough’s glossy main drag the sales assistants had told me that the whole area had come up a long way in the last five years, and now I could see they were right. Between Billington and Seaton Carew the industries filled the horizon. There were still fields of allotments in among the villages, but the housing looked either refurbished or spanking new, and Hartlepool sparkled. The new Marina looked like a chunk of San Francisco’s glass and pipe waterfront on a darker sea, or Sydney’s Darling Harbour under a darker sky. The franchises were stacked sideways one after the other like an updated Monopoly board. Stand-alone edifices had been helicoptered in from global America: Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Warner multiplex. There were whole streets of discos with percussive names like Passion and Pow!. Hypermarkets hugely occupied the spaces left by the pit-prop yards that died with the pits.

  One of the penalties a town pays for modern-day modernization is that it joins a homogenized world, but Hartlepool has kept a lot of its distinguished old buildings and buffed them up: the refurbs look even snazzier than the new stuff, and the general effect is of a civilized prosperity. Everyone you meet says that five years ago things were far otherwise, and the history books make that easy to believe. In the Depression, unemployment in the area ran at a steady 40 per cent. In May 1941, Luftflotte 3 was overhead for three nights at a time, clobbering the docks. But the really devastating raid was ordered in by Mrs Thatcher, whose government finally laid the old industries waste. It could be said that she made regeneration possible, in the same way that an Australian bushfire benefits a forest. She certainly handed New Labour the opportunity to prove itself. It undoubtedly has. Where graving docks and the smokestack industries once cranked out the wherewithal for owners and workers to lead unequal lives, now the new industries are moving in to chase the government aid, benefit from the cheap rents and the freed-up workforce, and gush the cash-flow for a fair civic order. After more than half a day on the trains I bluffed my way into the students’ café in the College of Further Education and heard a lot about the upcoming Summerhill complex, a council project to provide a recreational facility that will have everything: rock-climbing, BMX tracks, waterslides, something for everyone. Ann Summers didn’t get a mention but Peter Mandelson did. It wasn’t a Labour-controlled council any more, but it had been until last year, during the rebuilding period, and Mandelson was still what he had always been, a terrific constituency MP. When I asked what they thought of his leading the high life in London, they said that’s the way it had to be. ‘He’s here for the surgeries.’

  Next morning I turned up at his house in Sutton Avenue, where the prices run to about 50 or 60 thou. In London, as Mandelson learned too well, it costs ten times as much to live this neatly. The air of snug safety is somewhat offset by his police escort, but that’s got nothing to do with Hartlepool, or even with the prospect
of an incoming egg of the calibre that took out John Prescott. Northern Ireland will follow Mandelson for a long time. The only car he’s allowed to ride in weighs three and a half tons more than it looks. Paranoia would be understandable, but he answered his own door and emanated a convincing air of cool. Fine drawn in slacks and loose woolly, he moved to match his easy murmur. On his own immediate confession, or insistence, it’s only the press that makes him jumpy. Everything else – including, by implication, a rocket grenade with an Irish accent through his front window – is part of the game, but the press is something wicked. He recited from bitter memory a list of commentators who were on his case. Ten years ago, he said, it had been different, but by now the press had injected ‘quantities of cynicism into the political bloodstream’.

  Part of the press myself, if only on a part-time basis, I stuck up for our side by pointing out that using the press had been the basis of the presentational politics which he himself had done a lot to invent, and that the policy had reached its questionable apotheosis with Blair’s Pied Piper routine at St Olave’s. It was at this early point that he called me a wizened old media hack. We were in his kitchen, the coffee was still brewing, and already he had me reeling at how unguarded he could be. In conversation, the man determined not to bore himself is the one least likely to bore anybody else. Mandelson treats any topic to his own high standards of exposition and will continue talking unless interrupted. On the other hand, he listens carefully to the interruption and takes off again from what you said, instead of merely continuing with what he was saying before. When pressed in rapid exchange, he can cover any given topic in three or four nuanced sentences, any one of which could be used to murder him without even being misquoted.