Far Away Wills

I remember the moment that I first knew for a fact that there was no Santa Claus. It’s a cliché really, the kind of a story that you see all the time on TV and in films. You see something you really like, you ask for it for Christmas, you really behave yourself for the whole month of December. Then you wake up on Christmas morning, creep downstairs full of hope and trepidation that it’ll be there waiting for you under the tree (which you really know, of course, it will be), and then: disaster. It’s a no-show and you’re whole childhood is ruined. No present, no Santa. And what was the one present that I really wanted more than anything else that year? Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World.

Unfortunate, but true. Sort of.

I first saw this book during my Erasmus year in Rome, before Christmas 2004. We could get English-language newspapers in Largo di Torre Argentina, and would usually get The Sunday Times. Their Culture section reviewed it fairly favourably, I think, but in particular I remember being struck by the idea of the book as appealing to me. At this stage I had no real notions of what New Historicism entailed, and I liked the novelty of the detective work involved in piecing together someone’s life from their writings. So I thought I’d ask for it for Christmas: I was pretty sure I wouldn’t easily get it in Rome, and being on Erasmus I had plenty of time to read outside the curriculum (there not really being one to speak of). By then I was 20, and so had outgrown the stage of being a predictable gift recipient - Lego didn't quite cut it anymore - so I thought I could make things easy for the parents and narrow down the search. ‘What would you like for Christmas?’ ‘Will in the World’. Sorted.

But no. I swear to God I have rarely been so disappointed. It might seem a little dramatic, but this was all I wanted. All I asked for. I don’t even remember what I actually got, that’s how clouded my memory has become with the outrage of being denied my rightful present.

So three long years passed, and I went Greenblattless. I remember a pang hitting me right in the stomach during final year English Renaissance Literature lectures when his concept of “Renaissance self-fashioning” was pounded into our heads, but aside from that I remained fairly uneducated as to who Shakespeare might really be underneath it all. I think I was too scarred to go out and buy it myself.

Eventually though, enough was enough. I brought up my trauma with my mother in about November, and on December 25^th, 2007, I was presented with a bright shiny copy all of my own. Happy days.

All told Will in the World is very entertaining. As mentioned, Greenblatt’s aim is to produce a portrait of the playwright armed only with his plays, poems, and whatever scanty contemporary information survives. Now, when it comes to Shakespeare’s extant work, there are plenty of people out there who know everything there is to know. Plays and sonnets have been analysed and reanalysed, parallels have been drawn, motifs outlined, and all in all Shakespeare has proved a renewable source of academic energy. But when it comes to Shakespeare the person, we know nothing. Greenblatt knows no different, and doesn’t profess to know any different, but if there’s anybody that can claim some sort of bragging rights on the subject, he can. Though he mightn't know anything for sure, what he does succeed in doing is providing us with real insight into the times in which Shakespeare lived and how they must have inevitably informed his work. While we have very little surviving documentation dealing with the personal life of Shakespeare, we do know a lot about the period that saw the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the beginning of that of James I, during which time he was writing. Greenblatt introduces us to the world that Shakespeare inhabited, and to events which he must certainly have heard about, if not have been present at himself. We know a great deal about his illustrious circle of friends, the university wits that counted Jonson and Marlowe among their number, and as such can glean how Shakespeare fitted into their ranks, or didn’t fit, as the case may have been. And such is the book: a series of cultural episodes from which the main character is unfortunately absent. It’s all a bit Becketty, really…

What little documentation we do have is almost entirely of a legal bent, recording property purchases and disputes over moneys owed. Famously we have Will’s will, in which he leaves his wife, the much-maligned Anne Hathaway, his second-best bed. We do know a little about the playwright’s father, the prominent citizen and one-time bailiff of Stratford, John Shakespeare, and much is made of what influence this character must have had on his son both as a boy and as a man. Greenblatt pores over all these documents, both those directly related to William as well as the more tenuous connections, reaching beyond the legalese into what must have inspired so prolific a playwright and poet.

For the most part he is very convincing, but it must be said that at times Greenblatt is reaching for connections that he wants to see rather than ones actually present. One section of the book dealing with the suppression of Catholics in Elizabethan England is particularly interesting from a cultural point of view. In this chapter Greenblatt describes what it was like to live during a very confusing time for English Christianity. The approved religion of the state had flipped between Catholicism and Anglicanism every few years since Henry VIII decided to ditch his wife, and though during Elizabeth’s reign people’s outward allegiances were to Protestantism, it doesn’t take much to guess that people would have kept up Catholic practices in secret, as was the case. Greenblatt recounts tales of various crusading Catholics striving to uphold the damned Papist faith behind closed doors. We are even given a brief portrait of the lead up to the Catholic gunpowder plotters’ failed attack on the Houses of Parliament and James I in 1605. This is all very interesting, but Greenblatt’s attempt to draw Shakespeare into the mix is tenuous at best.

While Shakespeare’s father was most likely a clandestine Catholic, and William would certainly have been initially raised as Catholic, there is little evidence to suggest that Shakespeare himself was particularly militant about the old faith. Catholicism does raise its head in his works where perhaps it shouldn’t, notably in Hamlet, when the dead king describes his daily torments in the decidedly Catholic purgatory (described only as a ‘prison-house’, perhaps to get the play past censoring eyes of the Master of the Revels), but that is all we can say with any conviction. Based on some fairly spurious evidence, Greenblatt invents an extended visit to the north of England for the young Shakespeare where he would have been party to secret meetings organised by militant Jesuit missionaries. Undoubtedly such meetings occurred, but whether Shakespeare himself ever attended any is another thing.

Though not thoroughly convinced by some of the particulars of Shakespeare’s life put forward by Greenblatt, I did very much enjoy Will in the World. As would be expected of such an eminent academic, the book is exhaustively researched, and the depth of Greenblatt’s knowledge of the period is extraordinary. Greenblatt himself would be first to admit that the book is largely nothing more than guesswork, and this is made fairly explicit in the chapter dealing with the sonnets. Here he describes just how far we are outside the close-knit contemporary group that would have been fully ‘in’ on the sonnets’ countless allusions and flirty hints, hints that we, from this distance, simply cannot get. The detective work is a lot of fun, and sometimes very rewarding, but in the end we can’t be certain of anything about the man. They say never meet your heroes, and I suppose it’s probably a blessing that we never can with Shakespeare. We won't ever know his secrets, but then again, he won’t ever disappoint.

Disco Inferno, Canto I

Now, I could make a point about my first post on this newly designated literary space being on a book that takes the demise of the written word as its subject matter, but then that would imply that this was a premeditated choice. In reality, it just happens to be the most recent book that I’ve finished. Besides, I think that the story of how I originally came across Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 novel is more interesting.

I nicked it.

On holidays last month in Oman visiting friends, we spent a day lazing by the pool in a sort of ex-pat country club while our friends were at work. At 2 Rials for the afternoon, it was much cheaper than the Hyatt hotel we’d chosen as our lazing spot two days beforehand (6 Rials - pricey), and was closer to the house. All sunned and swimmed out, we we making our way to the car when I noticed by the door a pile of take-one-leave-one books for holiday makers. I hadn’t one to leave, but needed something to read so I had a look through them anyway. I didn’t know much about Fahrenheit 451 except the basic premise of the story, that Francois Truffaut had made a film about it, and that Michael Moore had ripped off the title for his documentary on 9/11. Having now read it, I quite like the idea of having randomly chanced upon the book and ‘stolen’ it from a pile of unwanted titles – it seems to fit somehow. Oh, and if you’re reading this in Muscat and are wondering where your book’s gone, I’ve got it.

The story follows the events of about a week or so in the life of Guy Montag. Set in an unspecified but clearly not-too-distant future, Montag works as a fireman in an unnamed city. In this future world, the occupation has taken on a new role as bringing rather than extinguishing fires; firemen now being charged with the task of burning books (indeed, the name records the temperature at which paper – and so, books – catch fire). Unapproved literature has been outlawed and the written word is viewed with abject suspicion and distaste by the ruling powers. The only form of writing comes in manuals and pre-screened texts, thus ruling out any form of literature or original thought. In Bradbury’s future world, people are encouraged to lead hedonistic and thought-free lives, allying their emotions to televisions that fill entire rooms and sedating narcotics. Friends, families, and neighbours spy on each other and report suspicious book-oriented activity to the firemen, who swiftly set offenders’ houses ablaze, destroying all traces of intelligent and independent thought. The narrative follows Montag’s awakening from the horrific and emotionless life that is nurtured in this new society, as he begins to wonder what it is in these books that all the fuss is about.

Patently, this is a novel that owes an awful lot to more famous dystopian visions such as Orwell's 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Many aspects of Bradbury’s future have parallels to be found in these other titles – the multi-walled televisual experience that Montag’s wife prefers to real life echoes of Huxley’s overwhelming sensory theatres, and the backdrop of near-constant warfare between huge nations nods to Orwell. That said, Fahrenheit 451 is a force unto itself. Bradbury’s style is often frenetic and disjointed, mirroring the thought-processes of the protagonist Montag as he divorces himself from the artificial society that has somehow managed to build up around him. The writing gives a real sense of the reluctant fireman’s panicked yearning for contact with others who reject this new uncivilised civilisation, as well as his desperation to tear open and expose the newly anaesthetised world for the waste of human intellect that it represents. Though it’s true that Fahrenheit 451 is indebted to Orwell and Huxley, Bradbury’s vision of the future includes some truly terrifying aspects of its own. These can be seen in particular in the workings of the firemen. Armed with guns that shoot napalm-like jets of liquid fire over the offending literature, the firemen are also equipped with one key piece of machinery known as the Mechanical Hound. The Hound, an eerie creation described as straddling the line between living being and deadly robot, is programmed to record individuals’ particular odours and hunt them down. It is a relentless and almost flawless tool in bringing down fleeing criminals and one that Montag rightly fears enormously.

Also within the organisation of the firemen, Montag’s commander Beatty reveals himself to be one wholly indoctrinated into the new world order. With a depth of knowledge of human literary history that would seem to counteract all he believes in, Beatty is all the more frightening for his outright rejection of the literature he seems to know so well. It baffles and horrifies that one with such a wealth of humanistic knowledge can see in it no merit at all and would seek to destroy and eradicate it from the world for its inherent ‘danger’. In one wonderfully written episode, Beatty lavishes quote upon quote on Montag, first laying out a defence of literature before attacking and ruthlessly questioning its worth, all the while using the written word first for and then against itself.

There have been talks of making a new film of Bradbury’s novel since 1994 but issues over scripts, casts, and scheduling have meant that the project has been consistently delayed. Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and most recently Tom Hanks have all been connected with the production over the years as possibilities for the character of Montag. Wikipedia tells me that one of the principal reasons for putting filming on hold was the question over the relevancy of such subject matter in the age of the internet. In a world of computers where the written word is available instantly to more people than ever before in history – albeit in a new format – is Bradbury’s message one that needs reiterating? All well and good for Truffaut to ponder the future of books in the 1960s, but do we need a 21^st Century rendering? Personally I’m sceptical about the need to film a novel that so strongly argues against the transfer of information through televisual media; however, Bradbury himself was apparently happy with the previous effort saying it "captured the soul and essence of the book.”

In either case the novel itself is one that deserves greater attention. Brilliantly written and genuinely thought-provoking, Fahrenheit 451 deserves to be counted alongside the likes of 1984 and Brave New World, rather than merely recorded as a footnote of their influence.

Direction

The problem with deciding to keep a blog is deciding what to blog about. When first creating quickly learner I thought that my meandering thoughts and anecdotes would provide enough fuel for fairly regular posting, but as it turns out my life isn’t really all that entertaining. As such I, as was pretty inevitable, have neglected to post since the original entry below. To be honest, I needed structure. I needed something to keep me posting: in short, something to write about. Always a believer in sticking with what you know, I have turned to literature.

For the foreseeable future I’m just going to write about books, plays, poems, articles, anything written that I stumble upon during the course of my day. Perhaps not the most original idea, but it’s a start. I think this approach serves the double benefit of keeping me reading new and varied things while also encouraging me to keep writing. I have two literature degrees after all, so I might as well put them to some use. So, to begin, here follow my thoughts on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.