Villains of the year

I'm not talking Putin, Assad or lesser monsters of the daylight horror world, but three dreamhaunters of my reading and filmwatching year. Two gave me nightmares during an otherwise jolly Christmas in the bosom of our Lacock friends.

My compulsive pageturner was Fyodor Sologub's 1907 comic shocker The Little [perhaps better Petty] Demon, charting the descent into madness of a wretched provincial schoolmaster, Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, all envy, paranoia and hunger for the mortification of young flesh by the birch (top image, incidentally, is Boris Grigoriev's of Gogol's The Government Inspector as I couldn't find anything closer to this particular source). Peredonov's hopes for promotion through the agency of a distant, elderly princess - shades of The Queen of Spades - are exposed as ridiculous from the start, and their failure accelerates an already slippery slide.

Whereas Giulio Andreotti, seven times Italian prime minister and the all too real yet ungraspable subject of Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino's previous masterpiece before La Grande Bellezza, went right at the top of the tree and stayed there, God knows how, for far too long.

The inscrutable devil died only this year. He was the spider at the heart of the mafia web investigated by Peter Robb in Midnight in Sicily, so we knew a little about the circumstances before seeing the film, which might well confuse you if your grasp of labyrinthine Italian politics is forgivably loose. Yes, I need to see Il Divo again, but I'm not sure the density is really a problem when the basic issue of compromised political ambition is so clear. In any case Sorrentino makes a virtue of necessity by giving a host of red print - sometimes speeding up with deliberate absurdity - around murder victims and courtiers (all of whom have nicknames, like mafia henchmen).

The two cardinal virtues here are the bewilderingly beautiful cinematography - every frame a gem of perfect lighting and composition - and the flummoxing impersonation of Andreotti, 'Il Divo' himself, by Tony Servillo. What a gulf separates Servillo's performance here from his melancholy-mocking ageing playboy in La Grande Bellezza; but what a payoff in the virtuoso monologue where his Andreotti rises from impassivity to hysterical fury in trying to argue the right reason - keeping Italy together - for the wrong deeds (mass murder). He's even allowed a measure of sympathy in the scenes with his wife Livia. But the inner decline is inevitable.

And that's what seems to connect Peredonov and Andreotti with the truly horrifying Cathy Ames, negative pole of  John Steinbeck's strange and wondrous family saga East of Eden. Steinbeck leaves us in no doubt of what we're in for before we even meet her in the eighth chapter. 'I believe there are monsters born into the world to human parents', it begins, and a little later on: 'it is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth'.

Which explanation doesn't stop us hating Cathy or fearing what she's going to do next. The implosion here is much longer, over years, but it comes all the same. Peredonov and Cathy can't really be called tragic, for they have no perception of the path to their own downfall. Like Andreotti, with whom there's more room for doubt, they lack understanding of any human needs other than their own dreadful imperatives; they know nothing of compassion or even - again, not clear with the enigma of Andreotti - guilt. And so, as both authors make us abundantly aware, there is no complexity in their characters, only in the nature of the responses they cause: horrified fascination in Cathy's case, except from a few supremely moral individuals, and mirth at Peredonov's antics, tragic because there's a complimentary failure to understand the mental illness which leads to murder..

Yet both Sologub and Steinbeck make the banality of evil very compelling -  and in Sologub's case very funny, as in the manifestations of Peredonov's paranoia in the maltreated white cat he's afraid will report him to the police and the antics of the nedotykomka, the dirty little laughing creature rendered by Ronald Wilks as 'little demon', making two in his not always felicitous translation.  I came across the wacky Russian artist Dobuzhinsky's rendering of the nedotykomka in the novel below on a fascinating Russian website devoted to Sologub.

There are, of course, 'good' characters in both novels, even if the society of The Little Demon is mostly very shallow; it has a peculiar parallel plot in which a girlish schoolboy becomes involved in a queasy erotic game with one of three capricious sisters (a transferred homosexual fantasy on the author's part, perhaps?). Steinbeck's chronicle, on the other hand, is one of the richest and most nuanced novels I've ever read - I might even compare it to War and Peace. I can't frankly see the point of the film (Jo Van Fleet pictured up top in the middle with James Dean, and below), which as I understand it launches in two thirds of the way through the family history.

The recurring cycle is what counts. There are characters who comprehend the good but still veer to the bad; there are lyrical descriptions of the beautiful and occasionally ferocious Californian landscapes in which they're placed. And the Biblical parallels move quickly way beyond the schematic. It's certainly the most powerful book I've read this year, Steinbeck himself my fondest rediscovery for a very long time (hell, I never did get to blog about the enchanting road book Travels with Charley). He seems so very modern in his ecological concerns. So it's The Log from The Sea of Cortez, his diary of a journey with the polymathic marine biologist who inspired the loveable hero of Cannery Row and Sweet Sunday, which I ought to read next, or soon.

Opposites: Bernhard and Steinbeck

One of these great writers needs no introduction. The other might, to those like me on the fringes of the central European literary scene - though two sets of French friends exclaimed incredulously, when I asked whether they were familiar with the works of Thomas Bernhard, 'but of course'. Ah, the French. Needless to say, the German-speaking world knows him even better.

I'd certainly never read anything by the Austrian maverick until friend Xandra gave J a slim but beautifully produced - by Notting Hill Editions - volume of essays about farcical award ceremonies usually sabotaged by Bernhard, the recipient. Frances Wilson describes him in her introduction as a notorious Nestbeschmutzer - great word, a soiler of the nest - who always manages to desecrate and ridicule the 'self-important, feeble witted' givers of the 'so-called' literary prizes. But he does it so wittily, with such scathing repetition and emphasis, that a whole new world is created. I read it all twice in two sittings, and shall revisit with pleasure.

My Prizes turned out to be a gentle introduction to an obsessive world. The protagonist of Old Masters, a revered music critic called Reger who has sat in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum for 30 years, railing Timon-like against humanity, seems to be an intensified self-portrait, perhaps a parody.

I got so impatient at times with the old bore. Is there anything sillier than decreeing that it's better to skip a hundred pages of a good book and light on a passage at will ('it is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full, as one might say, rather than read the whole book as the normal reader does, who in the end knows no more than an air passenger knows the landscape he overflies')? An argument easily demolished: unless you've read the whole, how would you discover the passages which are of real significance to you? I know I could never re-read Proust - not entirely jokingly, I suggest replacing the boring bits about Albertine and her girl friends with reams of much more entertaining Colette - but I know what swathes of that monster novel mean to me. 

In Old Masters you're supposed to warm, I think, to the misanthrope when you learn about his domestic circumstances. I didn't. I found the codger simply annoying, but at least I had a dialogue with him, a bit more profitable than shouting at the telly. To read Bernhard's five slim volumes of autobiography, drawn together as Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, is to understand more: why he hates Salzburg, his home town, as an energy-sapping swamp in which there's nothing to choose between Nazis and Catholics; why his suspicion of most - not, as it turns out, all - teachers reaches insane heights; why he suspects mankind in the round; and how he suffered for years following a teenage health breakdown with pleurisy that seems to have escalated into tuberculosis.

It all becomes suffocating, if not by any means hopeless. Which is why, having seen and enjoyed the Union Theatre production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's flawed but admirably conceived Pipe Dream, I felt like I'd come up for air with the succinct Steinbeck novels on which the musical is based, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. While Bernhard writes long sentences, in one endless paragraph, which go round in manic circles of self-pity and recrimination, Steinbeck's are short, usually sunny even in dealing with the deepest questions of the human predicament, and often very funny (Bernhard can be funny, too, but in a black, demented way). Bernhard only ever, in what I've read, 'composes himself'; Steinback can see humanity in the round. The difference might be summed up in this quotation from Steinbeck in Jack Kerouac Alley near San Francisco's wonderful City Lights bookshop

and this from Bernhard, typical of how he gets round to the point and repeats it:

In Salzburg, with my family around, I had no time and no fresh air. As long as I was in Salzburg, I was close to suffocation, and during all this time I only had one thought in my head: suicide. But I was too much of a coward to commit suicide, and I was also too full of curiosity about everything. Throughout my life I have been consumed with a shameless curiosity which has repeatedly put a stop to thoughts of suicide. I should have killed myself on innumerable occasions had I not been held back on the surface of the earth by my shameless curiosity.

Same ends, different means. Here the two authors meet in the middle. But while Bernhard almost falls over the edge in his characteristic disgust, Steinbeck can wander into over-sentimentality. How is it that the bums, whores and tricksters of Cannery Row, Monterey, all end up being so goddamned loveable?

Maybe it's a matter of perspective. The first novel wonderfully ducks and dives between realism and metaphysics, announcing its intent in the second of its eagle-eye alternating chapters. Thus Steinback on the inhabitants of the Palace Flophouse:

Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavanged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come with his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

Cannery Row eventually drops its Rimbaudian prose and settles for Orwellian simplicity combined with great, snappy dialogue that cries out to be turned in to a play. Which I believe Steinbeck wanted for Sweet Thursday, in which after the Second World War the central figure, kindly, much-loved Doc the marine biologist - based on Steinbeck's closest friend in Monterey Edward F Ricketts, who inspired the novelist to take up the science - finds himself assailed by mid-life discontent, brilliantly described in pages of aching beauty and pithy images.

Doc's unlikely alliance with wild girl Suzy - who becomes a hustler in Fauna's brothel in the book, while in the 'family musical' she just 'helps out' - is the subject of the more focused but softer-centred sequel. I certainly cared for the will-they-won't-they destined-to-be-lovers even more than I had in the Union show, where they were played with great charm by Kieran Brown and Charlotte Scott (pictured here by Kay Young).

On, then, to East of Eden.

I can't think of a smooth transition to telling the world that my own will-I-won't-I wooing finally achieved its aim 25 years ago today. Three weeks earlier all those years ago I took J on his birthday to a restaurant called Frederick's in Islington's Camden Passage.

I don't know if I'd have had the courage to be so persistent had Ed Seckerson not asked me earlier that  summer, in Paris for Jessye Norman's recording of Carmen, whether I preferred boys or girls. No-one had ever put to me that very simple question. And so in a kind of coming-out I upped the pressure on what I really wanted, which only succeeded when J saw me in my natural environment up in Edinburgh for a City Lit Opera production of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi on the Fringe with the Rehearsal Orchestra.

The rest is history, though not, in the first years at least, so smooth a ride. But here we are, as happy as any couple, I reckon, knows how to be, and we've been through a lot. On Saturday our own beloved Ochs Peter took us back, on request, to Frederick's with Florian, the dear old Houri - who had been there egging us on all those years ago with a certain Kansas-in-August number from South Pacific - and his partner Chung Chu (aka Chunkers, Chunquitita or Madame Mao).

Frederick's was unrecognisable behind the familiar facade - I dimly remember a small conservatory, but now there's a great space opening on to a garden at the back. A splendid setting, and the food wasn't at all bad either. So onwards to what we can only hope will be the next 25 years. And since Rodgers and Hammerstein have cropped up twice above, let this be the anthem of the day/week. Sing along with Mitzi, everybody.

Portraits of Bernhard and Steinbeck uncredited on the sites where I found them; credits happily supplied on request.