Why did I write Eileen McHugh, a life remade?

I wanted to explore several strands, the first and most important being the interrelationship between popular and populist, understanding the latter term in its colloquial sense of wanting to achieve popularity, possibly at all costs. I have long found it intriguing why pop music, for instance, is assumed to refer to ‘popular’ music when something over ninety per cent of releases never achieve popularity on any measure. Probably more than ninety per cent of pop is also not from Tajikistan, but we do not call it Tajik music. Thus labelling things by what they are not could be an infinite process! If pop means populist, however, then it makes sense, because this art form seeks, by whatever means, to achieve public notice, sales, profit and the rest, with the stress on the words ‘aspires to achieve’, hence the failure of ninety per cent of the genre. This often leads to an artist compromising an idea to render it saleable. But if an artist does not do that, the work remains unknown, anonymous, unexperienced. How much should an artist in whatever form seek to live within the confines of recognisable genre? And is that possible without compromising what the artist wants to communicate? How far can one go along this road before reproducing cliché?

Eileen McHugh is an artist. She is a sculptor. She seeks no avenues of compromise in her work. Her career was short and unnoticed. Paradoxically, one of her works has achieved viral status on the internet via a photograph posted in the name of Mary Reynolds, who now wants to create a biography of the artist and a discussion of her work so that she can create a museum to display it. She has contacted Eileen’s mother and has the artist’s sketchbooks and notes.

Eileen wanted to tell stories in her work, stories that arose out of the detritus of people’s lives, their bits and pieces of discarded trash. Her work at one stage is described as ‘off the wall’ as well as on it. The form of the book, however, repeatedly illustrates how lives themselves mirror this state. The lives of people who knew the artist become like new works created by Eileen, assemblages of life’s discarded bits and pieces.

Another strand was the obsession that drives artistic expression, if the motivations of populism and profit do not apply. Why exactly did Schubert write over six hundred songs when he never heard a single one of them performed before a paying audience? What motivated the composer Mieczeslaw Wenberg to ‘write for the shelf’? What drove a deaf Beethoven to communicate via sound?

And why is it that we often feel challenged by art? Is it because we have no idea what we like, and prefer to live in the security of liking what we know? Is it because we only trust things with which we have an assumed commercial relationship, so therefore we trust the transactions being offered?

Paradoxically, by the end of Eileen McHugh, the artist herself is perhaps the person we know the least, despite having been the subject of the whole book! If we do not see people as assemblages of their petty likes and dislikes, any of which might change on whim, what is left? Perhaps it remains as anonymous and unknown as ignored work. Our real contribution to humanity, however, artistically or otherwise, is eventually revealed as that which we give to others. Even tragedy can have a positive outcome.

Verdi: Man and musician by Frederick J Crowest

I began reading this on the bus coming back from Valencia, having consumed Byron’s Corsair on the way up, before a performance of Il Corsaro. Amazing to see what had happened to the English language in a few decades! OK, the Byron was supposed to be poetic…

Crowest’s short critical biography was written at the end of the nineteenth century. Verdi is still alive, but has completed all of his operas, including Falstaff. What is truly amazing about the book is the inclusion of quotes from reviewers throughout the century. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who might be put off expressing themselves because of a fear of what criticism might bring. In an apparent stream, critics of the nineteenth century queued up to lambast Verdi’s work as crass, unintellectual, in bad taste, loud, shallow… By the end of his life, most of the critics are kowtowing to greatness.

I have to find myself agreeing with quite a lot of the detailed points, however, as the above illustrates. Otello and Falstaff are different, however, in that they have stopped using the set pieces that he seemed to love in the earlier years.

An interesting if now irrelevant fact relates to the composer’s name. VERDI, Crowest assures us, came to stand for Victor Emmanuel Re d’Ilalia. Though Verdi, we are told here, shunned all aspects of politics, his identification with Italian nationalism cannot be denied.

Overall this seems to confirm what I am coming to believe more strongly by the day – that people don’t know what they like, they like what they know. Given enough airings, even Verdi became acceptable!

The Wall of the Plague by Andre Brink

At the heart of the book is an obvious but tenuous parallel. Andrea Malgas is an attractive – even stunning – coloured woman from South Africa. She has lived in Europe for several years and has become involved with a film-maker who is researching the plague in Europe, southern France in particular. She has had a number of relationships, the first with a white Englishman beginning in South Africa and thus breaking the law. Association took her to Paris. Paul is the current incumbent and he is the film-maker. Andrea gets a job she does not want, to accompany an ANC exile on a tour of southern France. The initial revulsion turns to attraction and Andrea becomes rather homesick. The obvious parallel that does not work arises out of the juxtaposition of being black or coloured in South Africa and being an outcast in the era of the plague, an illness that makes some victims turn black.

At the heart of the story, always, is Andrea. She seems strangely unable to direct her own life, despite coming over as a thoroughly focused person. It is almost as if by taking control of situations she becomes a victim of them. Mandla (not Mandela!) is revolting to her as far as first impressions go. A few chapters later she is in bed with him, unable to resist a raw physicality that elsewhere she often decries. She is a complex type with a complex past that has consciously and unconsciously always sought to challenge. She similarly seems to reject South Africa and its unacceptable social system and racist laws, but equally can not get the place out of her system.

Eventually the attempt to marry the parallels simply falls apart, and we are left with a psychological analysis of Andrea’s approach to life. It’s an interesting read, but never really captivates. TimeOut on the front cover reviews it as “a very good book”. Let’s leave it at that.

Imaginings of Sand by André Brink - masterpiece

Imaginings of Sand by André Brink is, simply put, a masterpiece. Not only does it bring convincing characters to life, flesh out the history of a people, portray the fortunes of a family coping with imposed and unwanted change, it also addresses one of the main political events of the late twentieth century. And André Brink´s novel does all this without the slightest recourse to polemic or posturing. Its themes and statements emerge from the shared lives of its characters. This is subtle authorship at its most accomplished. How many novels might aspire even to one of these achievements?

We are, as in many works by André Brink, not only in South Africa, but also within the Afrikaner community.  We see things through the eyes of Kristien, who is clearly named after her grandmother, the dying Ouma, who is called Kistina. The difference between the names is both slight and significant. They may be separated by time and by political difference, but by the time history has had a chance to view them both, they may be much more similar than first sight might suggest. They are undoubtedly cast in different landscapes, not only in time, but also in terms of the landmarks that might endow their individual sense of permanence. Not only do their values seem different, surely they conflict, given their different politics and ages. Mid-thirties Kristien, of course, has been politically active, while her grandmother has lived on an Afrikaner farm all her life.

Imaginings of Sand begins with Kristien being summoned back to South Africa, because her grandmother is dying. In London, Kristien has had ties with the African National Congress and has campaigned against Apartheid. Her family, with roots stretching back to the original Voortrekkers are, on the face of things, conventional Afrikaner farmers, complete with black servants and employees alongside attitudes that accept without question the supremacy of the Dutch Reform Church, allied to supreme white skin and thus Apartheid.

The message to Kristien in London arrives as South Africa faces change, just before its first multi-radial elections. Apartheid is already a thing of the past, but not yet officially. Political transition is feared by the Afrikaners and there has been much talk of feared violence, even of bloodbath. Kristien´s family house has been attacked and set on fire. Ouma was very old and perhaps frailer than she liked to admit, but now trauma has taken her close to death. Her doctors expect it to be just a few days hence. Her granddaughter insists she should die at home. She has the place cleaned up and made habitable enough for herself and her grandmother, plus, of course, the servant family.

Once home, Ouma Kristina begins to tell her granddaughter the family history and her own life story. How much of it is truth neither Kristien nor we will ever know. Whatever racial or cultural purity the family in theory might claim, Ouma´s history of their ancestry identifies the inevitable complexity. But a thread that runs throughout is the central vulnerability of women. Sweet children, then playthings and finally enforced child-bearers seems to be the repeated and indeed only pattern. Any deviation assumes a break from both culture and identity, but it is a break that anyone from an Afrikaner community finds almost impossible to accomplish. Publicly condemned for any expression of independence, women are equally damned for any sign of disloyalty to community or family or husband, no matter how inconsiderate, lascivious or even violent he may be. For the first time, Kristien comes to terms with the life her own mother led before she died all too young.

History seems to have repeated itself a number of times. Anna, Kristien´s sister, seems to be respectably but unhappily married to Casper, who is both Boer and boor. When he is not chasing a woman´s tail, he is busy organising what can only be described as a vigilante force to anticipate problems of majority rule. They seem determined to get their retaliation in first.

And so the tale of family and national history unfolds. The politics of state, community, family and sex develop and intertwine. Race, gender and class play their roles as well. But yet this novel never descends into polemic. It is never less than credible, never less than real. Its style, indeed, in often an African variety of magical realism that both amplifies and enlivens the already fantastical stories of Ouma Kristina. The plot always surprises, even to the very end, but none of these events, however, bizarre, is anything less than credible, From the start, it is a masterpiece.

Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse

I can remember the days we used to sit around in South Kensington when I was a student talking about the latest Hermann Hesse we had just read. It’s over 45 years ago…and I´ve not read much of his work since then.

Beneath the Wheel is an early work, his second novel, published in 1906. Strangely, it does not feel like the work of a young man, despite dealing with adolescence as its central theme.

Hans is a studious young man from a modest background who outperforms his own estimation in entrance exams. He gets his place. He becomes very studious indeed and seems certain to graduate with sufficient achievement to become a pastor. Whether this is his own ambition is never particularly clear. But the assumption follows him around as he studies.

And then there appears Hermann, who may or may not be named after the Germanic opponent of the Roman Empire. Hermann is a direct, experience-led, let’s go for it type, the very opposite of Hans. They become friends. There is at least a suggestion that the thought of homosexuality, rather than the reality, formed part of their process of mutual change. Their relationships with their own intellects change, however, as does the way that intellect is approached by others. Hans is destroyed. But he is happier, we might think, than he would have been had his life never contained risk.

At least that’s one way of looking at things. It might also be read as a warning, a morality to encourage the young to stay on the straight and narrow. One might conclude that at the time Hesse himself was aware of a dichotomy within his own thinking, and this might have been his way of writing what he saw as a demon out of his system.

The style was recognizable from early on. There is a detachment about this writing. Dialogue usually seems said and difficult, and the roundness of the experienced is tempered by the fact that it seems rather removed from the reality in which it participates. Didn’t expect it to enthrall, but it did.

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

This proves to be a surprisingly good read. He contrasts hunter-gatherer societies, especially those in New Guinea, with WEIRD societies – white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. A taste…

P174 Even studies of child development that claim to be broadly cross-cultural – eg comparing German, American, Japanese and Chinese children – are actually sampling societies all drawn from the same narrow slice of human cultural diversity…. As a result, those and other state-level modern societies have converged on a small range of child-rearing practices that by historical standards are unusual.

P300 real difference between hunter gatherer, traditional societies and WEIRD ones is that the traditional society allows you to have sex whenever you want, but you really worry about where the next meal is coming from…

P301 describes practise of pooling food resources in traditional societies... Even those who have not participated in the foraging or hunting get a share.

An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations by William Playfair.

Perhaps the less said the better… It’s long, at least we can all agree there. He seems to have a problem with selling things on credit… He also seems to be incapable of imagining a circumstance whereby a growing United States might just outgrow UK not only in size but also economic capability. He sees the growth of the US as a means of assuming the continued dominance of UK manufactures for decades to come. Maybe he was right. On the whole, however, neither an edifying read, nor a memorable one.

It may be a big work, but it richly deserves its thin reputation.