A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde

 

A Postillion Struck by Lightning is the first part of Dirk Bogarde’s seven volume autobiography. First published as long ago as 1977, it has stood the test of time, has been widely read throughout its existence and has been reviewed, probably, hundreds, if not thousands of times. This, therefore, is not a review of the book, but a reflection on a particular aspect of it.

The first volume covers years of childhood, schooling, and finally professional stumbling towards what became a highly successful career in films. It might be said that Dirg Bogarde had three different film carriers, a mass market, Mr. Clean in the Doctor films, the experimenting intellectual in his art house period and finally accomplished and internationally recognized character acting in his Death in Venice phase.

Here we have the idyllic childhood spent in the Sussex cottage or around Hampstead in North London. We have the failed school years where first nothing much interested him and then, during his time in a Glasgow technical school, when nothing at all interested him. He had to live with an aunt and uncle during those years in Scotland, and his only self-protection came by learning a Glaswegian accent.

He was born into a special family. His mother had been an actress, while his father was art critic at The Times. The surname originated in Belgium and his grandfather deliberately lost himself up-river in South America, only to return, old, aged, grumpy and cantankerous.

Dirk Bogarde’s prose is highly expressive and includes moments of vivid colour when events are magnified to significance. On country walks we share the vistas, smells, an occasional hug of an animal, always with something that amplifies the experience. We feel we personally get to know the tortoise. In later pages, he is already on stage, disdainful, he says, of any notion of stardom. He is happy to be doing what he does, and small venues in London, amateur to semiprofessional, will do. But we know what happened next.

But perhaps the most intriguing section in A Postillion Struck by Lightning happens in Glasgow, on a day when he is playing truant from school. In the 21st-century, the victim of sexual assault is granted whatever space is demanded to describe, relive, speculate, question, compensate, or indeed pursue -or indeed any verb that may be applicable – the recalled experience. In 1977 Dirk Bogarde relates his own experience from the 1930s in almost a bland, matter-of-fact way. It comes across almost as if it were a scene from one of his films. The detail of the assault can be experienced by reading the book, and it is essential that it is not described here because it has a theatrical character that itself is grounded in the cinema. It was, nevertheless, a real experience and a terrifying one as well. Now presumably, possibly, the perpetrator of this assault was still alive when this book was published, and yet there appears to be no record of the actor’s having pursued any action against his assailant.

One of the joys of reading is being presented with the surprising or the memorable. When I began A Postillion Struck by Lightning, I never for a moment thought I would be writing this kind of review.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz

In A Tale Of Love And Darkness Amos Oz writes an autobiography of his early years. Though written from a much later perspective, this memoir effectively lives entirely in the first years of the author’s life, covering birth to the age of twelve, when his mother died in 1952. There is also much in the book that is drawn from his adolescence and his work in a kibbutz after leaving home, but these remain like visions of an only partially real future when the narrative returns, often abruptly to those earlier years when his mother was still alive. There are detailed stories of schooling, discovery of literature and a little of his coming of age and his first experiences of an adult life of love and affection. There is much more about his father and his only partially successful life as a writer and academic, plus some other things for which he displayed equally unrecognized talent. There is also a good deal of Jewish history, especially that related to the post-World War II diaspora from Europe to British-controlled Palestine.

But at its core this book is essentially about the relationship between Amos Oz and his mother. It starts with her giving birth to him and ends with her death, just twelve years later, an event that left the author with deep feelings of guilt and loss, of course. But there is more, in that one also feels there has been a lasting psychological scar that has marked much of the author´s work.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness succeeds in many ways – too many for a cursory review as this to list, let alone describe. Its description of family life in the 1940s in Jerusalem must head the list. This was no rip-roaring, unpredictable household. The father was bookish, a man who yearned to be an academic, to feel the social respect that would be conferred with authorship and recognition. Much is made by Amos Oz of his father’s unrecognized talent and, one feels, the son was perhaps prouder than the father when the latter eventually gained his doctorate from the University of London. Both much had passed by before then.

Despite the book’s vivid portrayal of his own and his relatives’ families, Amos Oz seems almost to freeze in mid-sentence when he describes his mother. She was clearly an immense, if rather distant influence on him. She was domestically inclined, very attractive, perhaps aloof and certainly long suffering, as her husband pursued his private dreams in his even more private study amongst his books and papers. She was probably not alone in this situation, but perhaps more alone than she herself or especially others were willing to admit.

These families’ origins where in the Baltic states, Poland, Russia and other parts of Europe. They left for Palestine, pushed by the hardening fist of fascism and, elsewhere, mere intolerance. Most who stayed behind perished. They were greeted by a British administration in the Middle East that was never clear in its priorities and where policy was made on the roof. Nothing much changes, it seems. Calls for Jewish statehood were pursued alongside direct action and this era of tension and privation forms the backdrop for the early years of the author’s life. Aged eighteen, he would eventually meet Ben-Gurion, an encounter where the nervous tension, pride and awe jump from the page only to evaporate as quickly.

Amos Oz had relatives who were writers and academics, but they generally did not use their influence to foster his father’s ambitions, though this did not seem to generate tensions. His father’s stoicism would probably not have tolerated comment. Language was always at the core in the home, however, with his father‘s command of Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, Lithuanian and Russian allowing etymology to become breakfast talk.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness is especially memorable for its description of the author´s education. He attended all kinds of establishment, private and public, with both classroom and personal settings. He becomes infatuated with one teacher and certainly educated purposefully by another later on. It becomes an experience powerful enough to live on through a lifetime.

Eventually Amos Oz decided to adopt kibbutz life. This seems to come as a surprise, as much to Amos has his family, we feel. But he embraces the new challenges, appearing to relish the directness of physical work. Perhaps this was a psychological reaction to the face that his father’s rather withdrawn bookishness might have alienated his mother in the household. This is something that is alluded to in the book, but only via the opinions of the author’s relatives. It is certainly not stressed. But through kibbutz life, Amos Oz learns that the most effective way to become a writer is to live life and observe it. The writer then may interpret it.

But there is darkness here as well, a personal darkness that the author regularly alludes to and then quickly avoids. We feel it is surely the memory of his mother’s death which is resurfacing. If there is guilt involved, then its source is surely the perceived inability to influence events, to go back and change the circumstances that gave rise to tragedy. If only…

In the final pages, the author is again just twelve years old. He watches as his mother falls into the sleep that is the end of her life, a memory relived from the distance of middle age, but the memory remains as vivid as it was on the day it happened, illustrating that a silence of sleep, when eternal, is more powerful than any words can describe.

Dreams In A Time Of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Put simply, Dreams In A Time Of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a beautiful book. But it is also challenging, engaging, shocking, endearing and enraging at the same time. It also offers truly enlightening insight into the psychology, motivation and eventual expression of a great writer. Anyone who has admired Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat will adore Dreams In A Time Of War, because the fiction that rendered the novel such a complex and rewarding read is here as reality, in all its greater rawness of immediacy, contradiction and conflict.

Dreams In A Time Of War is an autobiography, covering Ngugi’s infant and childhood memories until the day he left home, as an adolescent primary school graduate, to join Alliance High School. Thus we journey in Ngugi’s account from a homestead shared with a father, four wives and numerous siblings to the start of a Western education with its subject boundaries and prescribed canals of thinking. It would be easy to suggest that this represented a journey from the traditional to the modern, but that would be naïve. It would also miss the point.

Tradition, in Ngugi’s recollections, is extremely important, especially the magic of language. Words, clearly, were always for him much more than labels. The Kikuyu language that was his birthright offered a richness of expression and meaning - not to mention an identity - that fired his imagination from a very young age. It was also a language that was denied and derided by at least part of an education system that proselytised on behalf of the colonial, the modern. Throughout Dreams In A Time Of War we are aware of this potential for conflict, where the clearly academically gifted young Ngugi yearns to read and learn, but is regularly reminded that the only acceptable vehicle for that activity was the English language. For some who emerged through the vicious selection for entry into the educated elite, this denial of identity led to a rejection of birthright, origin and perhaps culture, so that they might more completely and convincingly adopt the new status to which they aspired. In Ngugi’s case, this demanded denial of his own background led him to appreciate it, its values and its worth more acutely. It is a mark of the book and equally the man’s complexity, however, that he not only retained an insider’s appreciation and understanding of his birthright, but also embraced the English language and education to become one of the language’s greatest writers.

Ngugi’s description of tradition is never static. At the same time, his view of modernity is never uni-dimensional. He recognises that his people’s ceremonies have changed over the years and that their significance has altered. Old men’s stories may still enthral the young, but the world described has already changed. Farmers have been driven from their land. Estates growing crops for cash and bounded by fences have been established. Factories offering wage labour have opened. Many of the structures that bound families and communities together have been transformed, perhaps not broken down, but have at least been challenged by new allegiances and aspirations.

Equally the modern is not presented as a monolith. Two different education systems coexist, one that transmits only Christianity and European values, and one that admits local language and learning. In the same way that individuals are influenced by what they are taught, they are also transformed by their experience of employment, of nurture by institutions and comradeship. In Kenya, for some this included loyalty to King and country via service in two world wars, acceptance of Christianity, responsibility to exacting employers and land owners, as well as, for others, acknowledgement of and adherence to tradition, family values and kinship transmitted by oral culture. And the reality that Ngugi portrays so beautifully in this book is that these apparently opposing poles were often mixed up within the individual, almost every individual.

If there is still anyone who retains the notion that British Imperialism was tantamount to spreading pixie dust, then such a person ought to read Ngugi’s childhood memoir. Here are descriptions of hooded informers - no doubt paid to say the right names, of indiscriminate detention, concentration camps and cold-blooded murder. And all this was backed up by a wholly unjustified and erroneous assumption of racial superiority. By the way, it’s about the same way they treated the working class back home, even down to denying most of them access to the educational goodies that legitimise social class identity.

Readers please do not be put off by the difficulties posed by the Kikuyu names and words. If they are unfamiliar, then find a way of summarising and merely recognising them. But do read this beautiful childhood memoir and thus do understand a little more of the experiences that motivate writers - and others – to explain. The view is partial, of course, that is why it is both entertaining and illuminating.

Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain

Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain is significantly more than an autobiography of a young woman. It presents, at least initially, a portrait of a society that nowadays appears quite foreign, takes us through a war that changed that society and rendered it obsolete and then leads us into an era that promised a new start, but which proved to be no more than a transition to the kind of modernity we now recognise. Testament Of Youth thus reads like a personalised view of history, written by an author who was conscious of change as it happened, and, indeed, was am agent in that change. Vera Brittain was also capable of appreciating the consequences that would follow.

Prior to the outbreak of World War One, Vera Brittain inhabited what were then described as the English middle classes. They bore no resemblance to what we nowadays identify with that label. These people were not merely professionally employed and propertied. They might proudly own two or three abodes here and there. They probably had servants, though they might not have referred to them as such. Private income was common, as were assumptions about education, marriage, career, deportment, manners and a host of other social trappings.

This, of course, was an era when only a small fraction of the population had any access to higher education, where women could not vote, where Britain still thought she ruled the waves. The Empire was still very much intact. Despite her commitment to feminism and her desire for independence, Vera Brittain seems, at the start of her memoir, to be heading by default straight for convention, as currently assumed by her class. But then the war came.

World War One lasted more than four years. The carnage was on a scale the world had never previously witnessed, and of an industrial type that had only recently been manufactured. Unlike modern warfare, however, the majority of the casualties were combatants, not civilian. By World War two, of course, the paradigm had changed,

World War One killed off almost a complete generation of young European men. Like many women, Vera Brittain joined up herself, feeling that she must contribute to the war effort in some direct way. But she became a nurse and her experiences caring for the wounded from the trenches form the bulk of Testament Of Youth. Her description of her work and those she nursed are vivid but balanced by detachment. She relates her experience without exaggeration, lists the horrors without once trying to shock for the sake of effect. Some of the most moving passages relate to those whose injuries were so severe they were left untreated. The stoicism with which they accepted their deaths is portrayed in its full, cold, terrifying inevitability.

At the end of the war, Vera Brittain can only be described as being in a state of shock. She had lost family and friends, and the man she would probably have married. She had nursed countless wounded, many close to death, many disfigured or jut shot to bits. By the end of 1918, it was clear that the world was not going to return to what it had been at the start of the decade. Women, of necessity, had done work previously denied them. They had the vote. A generation of young men had been interred.

And so Vera Brittain returned to university, but to study history rather than literature. Her desire to write was still there, but now she wanted to do something political or journalistic in an attempt to prevent the carnage she had seen from ever happening again. She offered support to the League Of Nations. But there remained a vast hole in her personal world, an abyss that nowadays we might diagnose as post-traumatic stress.

Eventually, she has her writing published and the possibility of marriage and a family reappeared, just when as a woman in her thirties, she had begun to assume her life would not take that route.

Testament Of Youth is a magnificent account or war, not of combat or heroism, nor indeed of comradeship or anything to do with militarism. Testament Of Youth describes consequences, both direct and indirect, and reminds us of the depths of suffering plumbed by the insanity of conflict. It deserves a wide reading today, since there seems to have emerged a tendency to portray war as mere memoir, rather than as wholesale, industrial, indiscriminate slaughter.

Ways Of Escape by Graham Greene

Ways Of Escape is one of the most rewarding and, surprisingly, surprising reads one might encounter. On the face of it, the book is Graham Greene’s artistic, literary autobiography. A second half and companion volume for A Sort Of Life, Ways Of Escape deals chronologically with Graham Greene’s works, his inspiration and his development as an author. All of this, we may believe as we start this book, is well known, well document, even public knowledge. 

Ways Of Escape reveals, however, that much of Greene’s inspiration was quite personal, often very private, and it is through this that surprise emerges. The book catalogues brilliantly the sometimes direct, sometimes loose relationship between experience and inspiration. Graham Greene is apparently candid about the nature of his invention. Whether it is achieved via amalgamation, imitation or juxtaposition, for the author it appears to be eventually rooted in experienced reality. 

What Ways Of Escape communicates above all is how much Graham Greene was occupied with his writing alongside a life that seemed already utterly packed with travel, journalism, various employment and risk, so packed that people encountered along the way could never have suspected that they were being analysed for their potential as future fictional characters. 

 Graham Greene is self-deprecating throughout, appearing to belittle his own work, thus showing little respect for the critical acclaim of others which, by the end of the period in question, was considerable. Many of the scenes from his work that he values seem to relate strongly to, perhaps clarify his own experience. And, for Graham Greene, experience was usually vivid and sought out to be so. He samples local prostitutes freely, drinks whatever is to hand and chemically alters the reality to which he otherwise seems to remain encountered as a participant rather than as an observer. 

 There are indicators to Greene’s ambivalence towards religion. He expresses respect for a simple, unquestioning faith. But he despises a middle class, “suburban” Catholicism that seems to assume an ownership of God. Greene, of course, belonged to that latter group by virtue of class, education and marriage, but one feels he yearned for a simple, stated and genuflecting responsibility to an omnipotent God. One also feels that this might be Romanticism, a desire to become an ideal to which he feels he may only aspire as a result of the mired filth of the life he perceives he lives. He relates some of his contact with the press, as well as with film. 

There are brushes with the law in the form of libel actions. Throughout, one feels his respect for his fellow professionals is at best limited. He even describes the word “media” as applicable to bad journalism, clearly placing himself above the label. But above all it is experienced reality that provides the gems. His description of bombardment in Sinai rings both true and vivid. “I remembered the blitz, but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open.” Such attention to detail alongside direct experience is what brings Graham Greene’s prose to life, and it is this rooting in the reality of experience that prods the reader into reaction. 

This is a masterwork by a master technician. But it is the book’s epilogue that, for me, provided a supremely apt and yet provocative coda. Here is a man who has imagined others, given them life in print and film, a man who seems to have little confidence in his own ability or thought for his consequence. And, we learn, he is a man who might even be someone else, someone who claims to be him, an Other. The juxtaposition of this idea with a life lived is both thought-provoking and disturbing – a masterstroke by a master of his craft, even his art. 

 View this book on amazon Ways of Escape (Vintage Classics)

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

A reviewer of A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White is presented with a number of problems, In the paraphrased words of one of the book’s characters, there may be a lot in the wash, but eventually not much to hang out, and this, by the end of the book, largely summed up what it had delivered. Be reassured, however, that the process of reading A Boy’s Own Story is a delight from start to finish. 

Edmund White’s style is quite beautiful, full of complex allusions, superb characterisation and, above all, masterful description. Every character springs to life off the page. If only collectively or individually they had more to offer… 

 A Boy’s Own Story is an adolescent’s discovery and realisation of his own homosexuality. The book promises a lot of sex and, sure enough, it both begins and ends with explicit encounters. Throughout the remainder, however, the sex seems to be more in the mind than in the experience. It appears that Edmund White’s adult recollection of his teenage dilemmas could have been subject to the embellishment of later reflection. Repeatedly the author stretches time to explore the detail of options whenever the boy of the title is presented with a dilemma. These were surely the voices of later years speaking through an ostensibly reconstructed, but surely imagined past. The boy always spoke eloquently about his choices, considered options in detail, but perhaps not convincingly. One of the more engaging aspects of coming of age sagas is how innocence is portrayed and how its conquest is engineered.

In A Boy’s Own Story one feels that Edmund White wants to deny that he was ever innocent, or at least suggest that he would ever admit it. And so a spark that could have lit up the glowing prose never quite ignited. When the book first appeared over twenty years ago, the fact that it did appear in its explicit form, apparently denying the guilt that oozes off every page, might itself have been worthy of note. Twenty years on it now reads as merely dated, but still it reads beautifully thanks to the author’s supreme skill with words and expression. The issues that might previously have rendered it remarkable have, however, long since cooled, so now the reader must approach the book either as it is, as an autobiography, or alternatively in historical terms.

The book, however, cannot sustain the latter approach. I will now certainly seek out other books by Edmund White, but in the case of A Boy’s Own Story I am tempted to conclude that though writers have to be self-obsessed, when that neurosis is turned completely inward, it raises new barriers that can exclude the reader. Hence the gloss. Hence the sheen of the whiter than white washing that proves to be just half a load.

View this book on amazon A Boy's Own Story (Picador Books)