Following on from last week's post, here, reported below, is a particular case which I feel should strongly be related to that of Jeremy Corbyn and wielding power over the minds and hearts of his Labour supporters in our society.
 
Sean O'Casey's second son, Niall, was born in 1935, and was educated at Dartington Hall, the alma mater of the left-wing glitterati and atheists such as Bertrand Russell and other Bloomsbury notables and their offspring. As Macmillan, also, said of that circle,’ all that lot were mad. They thought they were being very avant-garde. You see, no Russell ever went to school; they were always slightly odd; they never met other people’.
 
Neither Niall nor his elder brother Breon  brought home friends to meet his father, and Niall played the trombone, had a lively sense of humour, and an excellent ear for imitating accents. He later attended the LSE, but, alas from his father's point of view, didn't become fully radicalised, as one might expect from the left-wing track record of that institution.
 
It was after Niall had been demobbed from national service in 1955 that he developed a passion for politics like his father, but it was the tensions of 1956 when in June came the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, a move to forestall the nationalisation of the canal by Col Nasser and in support of Israel, that raised strong passions everywhere. Students of the LSE staged a demonstration in which one can imagine Jeremy Corbyn, had he been  the relevant age, taking part. This at one stage looked as if it might become violent.

​
 
But hot on the heels of the Suez debacle with which father and son were united in opinion, there followed the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which caused deep divisions in the British Communist Party. This brought Niall’s relationship with his father to a crisis.  Niall was deeply upset by the new imperialist phase of Russia revealed by this, and father and son argued hotly. O'Casey himself grew strangely stubborn and hard, and insisted that anyone who was against the Soviets should be shot.
​

"On this day ...."  BBC report of Soviet Invasion of Hungary

 
 Now O'Casey was known as a man of gentle nature and yet he could, and did, as has Corbyn, defended inhuman and murderous responses. But he showed, and dare one say it without being accused of political incorrectness, the other face of the left-wing relativism which shies away from consistency and integrity, while maintaining a touchy-feely appeal to the compassionate and empathetic. Yet ultimately could it be congratulating itself  on having the ‘right’ and true humanitarian feelings, and ultimately prove a rather disagreeable form of  narcissism? O’Casey, similar to Shaw, never gave this up, and like that other great playwright Bertolt Brecht , who supported the East German hard-line  regime, never changed his beliefs. One wonders what Corbyn might make of the left-wing realism of George Orwell, who while he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, ultimately saw into the heart of Stalinist oppression.
 
O'Casey's quarrel with his son reached its worse when Niall wrote to his father, “Dear Daddy, one can imagine the stakes that had been made in used in Europe as being the same here, as if the Soviet Union had liberated us from Hitler, and had set up J. R. Campbell and his gang as government. This isn't common wisdom at all. The "doublethink" reminds me of Capt Waterhouse."
 
Sean did not like this at all, nor bend an inch towards his son, for he had absolutely no sympathy with his enemy Orwell's coinage of the word doublethink. He failed to see that what distressed Niall more than the invasion itself was his own support of it. Scornfully he dismissed the letter, "he hides the distress under the careless scorn of  his letter writing”.
 
Next time Niall next came home to Devon, where his parents lived, he looked unusually tired and worn with his face, full of illness. He was at once diagnosed with a sudden onset of leukaemia, and after rapid and desperate attempts to stem the illness with transfusions and drugs, he died that same Christmas.   O'Casey used atomic testing as the scapegoat, declaiming "and the political bastards still go on with their atom bomb tests assuring the spread of this curse into every home, if their murderous madness isn't stopped”...
 
Yet who could say that his father's denunciation hadn't played a part in this catastrophic decline in his sensitive and highly strung son’s health. Many say that disappointment and frustration do and can play a critical part in the onset and development of cancer.
 
I can only add to this sorry, possibly instructive tale, the advice: Beware the iron, Stalinist fist hidden in the soft, velvety and well creased glove, attractive in its appeal of ageing careworn honesty like O’Casey’s.

​The example of a saintly left-wing activist who, at heart worshipped Stalin
 
As a biographer of the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey I cannot help thinking how similar in many ways he was to the present leader of the Labour Party. O'Casey was described by his publisher and lifelong friend Harold Macmillan as a saintly kind of man, who thought "everyone ought to be equal out of kindness". He was a very strong Irish Republican, who engaged in the 1917 uprising, the subject of which formed some of his best plays, and subsequently he settled in England, and was a close friend and supporter of Bernard Shaw.
 
Nevertheless, while maintaining his style of dressing always in rollneck sweaters and skullcaps he maintained relations with the highest in the land, and presented himself as a lover of mankind who took to heart the aspirations of poor and needy, and was against any kind of capitalist exploitation. Now you might have thought from reading his wonderful early plays Juno and the Peacock and Shadow of a Gunmen, and his outpourings of love and compassion to mankind and his three children, that he could never end up believing and supporting mass terror and extreme totalitarian repression.
 
In my next post I refer to  a particular case which I feel should strongly be related to that of Jeremy Corbyn and wielding power over the minds and hearts of his Labour supporters in our society.

For Part 2 look out for my weekly posting.
 

 I have to acknowledge being ‘driven’, in a slightly mad way, by reading through a lot of, but certainly not all, of the Marquis de Sade’s incontinent and repetitive sexual sagas: it is said he was the most prolific French writer of his day. It’s impossible not to have for his compulsive energy some kind of grudging admiration, I suppose similar in a way to the feeling I have for Milton’s fallen angels in Paradise Lost— although Lucifer and Satan are more wholesome.

       I found inspiration in Rider Haggard’s She, and, as it must be evident in the format I have used, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. But my main inspiration, if it can be called that (or at least object of curious fascination) is Les Mémoires de Saturnin, an anonymous volume I found in my garage loft here on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, when we moved into this fifteenth century courthouse in 1995. It could make a good publicity story, and it provides the start of The Book that Kills, by giving me the idea of a lost work with dangerous content, some of which, translated, I have included. 

      How this book got here I have no idea, it remains a mystery. I found a leading Dutch antiquarian bookseller has a later edition of the same work in his sale list for E 17,000. The British Library has only a mutilated edition. I sold it this year by auction at Christie’s. Some of the 24 illustrations (out of copyright) might be included in an edition of The Book That Kills. I have copies.

I wrote this review in December 1966 for the Financial Times and it is fascinating that only now is there a translation into English by Ralph Manheim which is opening at the Young Vic on 16 July:

"Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1966) is an outstanding work celebrating the life, and mourning the death, of Patrice Lumumba. It achieves a balance which is all too rare between left-wing idealism, and the depiction of colonial villainy. The reason for this that the form Césaire has chosen is near to the medieval morality plan. Lumumba is a mixture of Christ and Everyman, the Belgians are the stock buffoon agents of Satanic power (Satan himself is Uncle Sam). Battle is waged between innocence and evil, knowledge, truth and expediency, until the martyrdom of Lumumba is sealed. It manages to avoid the pitfalls of the documentary plan, too heavy an insistence on facts with a corresponding lifelessness of character and, even more impressively, it avoids the platform aspect which converts the playwright’s material to propagandist ends.

From the first moment we see Lumumba being savagely beaten by a pair of Belgian guards, we know whose side Césaire wants us to be on. But he never harangues us. He leaves his characters alone to get on with it, and human qualities emerge instead of doctrinal points. Compassion for the struggling ignorance of the Third World is all the more effective and thought-provoking to watch, because it is instinctive and not in any way clouded with remedies.

Césaire’s poetic gifts come to the fore in his underlining of his hero’s individual qualities, for Lumumba’s greatest gift is his deep imaginative grasp of the soul of his people. He wants to Congo to be Congolese, lackey of neither East nor West, freed from the suffocating machinations of international finance, freed from its own sense of inferiority. Lumumba tries to bring self-esteem to his people, wrench out of them a sense of dignity. The betrayal of Congolese independence by the great powers, the terrible decline from the exhalation of a new liberty to sordid massacres, and the furious spoil of civil war, have a decisive and controlled inevitability.

But the greatest pleasure and strength of Une Saison au Congo  remains in the writing, which ranges from simple direct satire in the political scenes, through the most extraordinary flights of brilliant rhetoric, to witty and poetic evocations of the Congo. It conjures up jungle and shanty-town, the majestic river itself:

                Père Congo,
                tu charries des fleurs, des fles.
                Qu’est-ce qui gonfle ton cœur gris
                et de hoquets te brise? …

As well as tawdry nationalism, there is cynical political manoeuvring, and splendid passionate confrontations between black Congolese, Belgians, and Dag Hammarskjöld.

A couple of weeks ago I went to People by Alan Bennett at the National Theatre: dutifully full with an audience averaging seventy: nothing wrong in that of course, except that it was quite a surprise to see the  National Theatre usurping or taking over from the old West End of the fifties and sixties.

Here is William Douglas-Home of the liberal left, in a barely disguised Lloyd George Knew My Father kind of play, demoted from Home counties and building a motorway through  the family estate to North Yorkshire, to a dispute between sisters as to whether  the decaying ancient pile should go to the National Trust or a private entrepreneur as a conference centre; it was a very mediocre star vehicle for Francis de La Tour. Hardly a new joke or a new situation in whole evening : resoundingly ‘droll’.

Went this Tuesday to the centenary celebration of the Critics’ Circle at the Barbican when life achievement accolades were handed out to each choice of the various sections of the Circle, mine being the Drama Section. The honoured luminaries included Danny Boyle, for Film (surely not Trance, his latest, I hope). Peter Wright (for Dance), the late Colin Davis for Music and Max Stafford- Clarke for Theatre, who said he was surprised to be there as he wasn’t either Trevor Nunn or Howard Davies—as all awards automatically went to them!

    Janet Suzman presided and I had a conversation with her prior to her mounting the rostrum about her Antony and Cleopatra production last year at Liverpool, and at later its revival at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Both of us much preferred it at Liverpool, confined behind the proscenium and much more intimate and in contact with its audience. Kim Cattrall, I felt, as Cleopatra was so much better  at Liverpool, on her home ground and found it harder to project in the Tyrone Guthrie round auditorium. Her earlier performance was sharper. She was good on the passion, but short on projecting the wily, manipulative trickster (a surprise, you’d have thought, after Sex and the City). On that occasion of the Liverpool first night, at the party afterwards, Ken Dodd, well over eighty, held forth in non-stop stand–up form for over an hour, and did amazing imitations of my father (who was a big Liverpool favourite in his day) singing ‘I’ll take you home Kathleen’ and ‘I’m only a strolling vagabond, so good night pretty maiden, good night!’.

     Janet in her introduction to the awards amusingly recounted how a stage door keeper couldn’t pronounce the name of the legendary Michel Saint-Denis, then a director at Stratford, when calling up a taxi. My first ever theatre job was as Saint-Denis’s assistant at Stratford. Danny Boyle got a boost to his career at the Royal Court when Max Stafford-Clarke was running it, while I gave Max a part on and off-stage as  ‘stage manager’   at the Traverse in my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author performed with just five actors— which led to him, when I left, running the theatre.

      Strange how over time these critic-artist encounters reverberate. Max regaled us with his account of how after a terrible critical panning at the start of his directing career he carried Harold Hobson up and down the stairs of the Theatre Upstairs(‘his tweed jacket chafing my cheek’), this earning his first unconditional, ecstatic review from Hobson, saying the theatre had to be filled every night. Not too difficult –it was the Theatre Upstairs. But now he himself had ended up a ‘raspberry’ like Harold (rhyming slang, ie ‘raspberry ripple- cripple’)—he had a stroke in 2007. There was no sign at all of this, except for a walking  stick: Max was on scintillating form and cheerfully defined how the relationship between critics and artist should be ‘constantly  renegotiable,’ which means if you get a lousy review you don’t  straight away go and stick your head in the gas oven.

As a writer of twenty or so published books and performed plays I experienced recently a baptism of showcase noise and dense crowd immersion by visiting the London Book Fair. Julian Friedmann, my agent, gave me an entrée to online enrolment so I duly submitted to the box-filling tedium,  messing up one attempt after another just as I do with my VAT return.  On arrival at Olympia, clutching an A 4 paper pass I dodged the laminating tag machine (what point more plastic waste in the universe?) and hit the huge sea of faces and stands.  I sought my publisher’s foreign rights specialist for my book about a German pope. What an overwhelming plethora of stalls, a bazaar for soul baring and trading, where cubic footage of space proclaimed power and publisher prestige, and thousands of earnest faces over tiny tables bobbed up and down in one-to-ones in their rare encounters in the flesh.

Soon I was light-headed and dazed in the Kasbah. At last  I found she whom I sought. My appointment over I went to find a coffee. Everywhere was too crowded. An acquaintance I hadn’t seen for many years caught up with me. I remembered his name, just about—and he mine. I knew he had been a book-seller in a highly respectable second-hand  book shop.

‘What do you do now? Why are you here?'  I asked. ‘I am a sample  buyer' he said, ‘A what?’ ‘ I buy samples, and we, the people I work with, sell them through Amazon?’ I couldn’t work this out. Oh, books laid out as samples on stalls! ‘How?’ We get up to 85% discount on the sale price just to cart them away. They can’t be bothered to crate them up and take them back:  you’d  be surprised how expensive too some of the big publishers’, like Chatto, wares are.’ ‘ Oh, so you’re a buyer?’

‘ I carry cash usually and arrange  for them to be packaged and taken off at the end of the fair. We have a warehouse.’

I was staggered. Here was a highly privileged –ex-public schoolboy,  a BA or MA, dressed to fit the right book fair image, working, I daresay lucratively, as a scavenger: buying up the orts and greasy relics of the fair, and handsomely profiting from them. An eye-opener to the ways of the giant Amazon—and no profit or royalty for the humble scribe!

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds Ad infinitum."  Jonathan Swift

I found myself heading fast for the exit door at a recent screening and new release of The Eye of the Storm, escaping as quickly as possible this turgid or perhaps rancid is a better word for it, adaptation of Australia’s Patrick White novel which I will certainly never want to read. (I am a great admirer of his Voss.)

I couldn’t work out at all what the film was about at all except this aged rich floozy, played by Charlotte Rampling, looking as if she’d been left in an I’m a Celebrity Jungle Get Me Out Of Here forever— and was now in bed dying— kept meeting her two awful offspring, one a despicable Australian actor (knighted for services to the arts?—most unlikely) played by Geoffrey Rush, the other a frigid French princess by marriage played by Judy Davis. Al l the characters are stilted self-conscious puppets endowed with thuddingly obvious misery- me lines, unable to evoke a shred of pity or love in one viewer (me).

To underline the down-under connection the frequent sex scenes were loaded with platypussy platitudes, and—alas— I could never detect beneath this posturing, narcissistic slice of upper crust decay any gripping story-line. Where has the Charlotte Rampling of yesteryear gone?

This week, four of my previously published biographies of theatrical giants have been republished as e-books. This alone would be exciting, but in addition my biography of Pope Benedict XVI will be published in a couple of weeks. And my book on the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment 1943-44 comes out early in April.

From writing, editing, obtaining permissions, proof reading and co-0rdinating with different publishers and agents, it has been an exciting and hugely tiring few weeks.

Not for one moment am I ungrateful. How many people would be grateful as, believe me, I am.

With another two books due for publication later this year, I consider myself extremely fortunate.

For more information have a look at my Writing page.

It is rather like the proverbial London buses.

Near to Easter my biography of Pope Benedict XVI will be published by The History Press.

Here is their draft press release.

I will post more news shortly. It is an exciting project and has involved much burning of the midnight oil.