Snow Country

 Novels are not like albums. Most bands have a career that grows to a pinnacle, and once you have heard The Great Album there is very little to convince you that they will ever reach the same dizzy heights again.

I’m glad that novels do not work like that. If it was the case, I don’t think Sebastian Faulks would ever have recovered from the majesty of ‘Birdsong’.

And yet here is another novel as deep and as moving, about another corner of Europe, with characters just as real.

I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes his writing so special. The closest that I can get is that it stays with you. The characters are so complete and real that they linger after the last page. It’s something about their voices that make them like ghosts that keep coming back to you for days. Perhaps ghosts is the wrong term, because there is nothing frightening about it.

 I am not sure if it is a peculiarity of the British, but both World Wars seem to still loom in our fiction, film-making and popular history. Do the French and Germans dwell on the two wars as much as us?

As a result, almost every angle of what happened to the Fighting Tommy has been thoroughly explored. However, Faulks is able to write fiction that continues to mine the two greatest tragedies of the last hundred years. He knows that the tragedy of war is as much in the commonplace as the heroic. He writes in order to illuminate the ordinary lives of people, to bring them to life, and then tell you how the war twisted and damaged them.

In ‘Snow Country’ the perspective is Austrian, and particularly Viennese. British readers will rarely think, ‘I wonder what it was like for normal Austrians in 1916?’, and yet here it is. The view from the other side of the fence. The same loves, career struggles, visits to the theatre, favourite meals, and all the other things that we know, are described from the point of view of a young journalist called Anton. The story follows his progress from the schoolroom to the Russian front and back to his home city in the 1930s, still reeling from his experiences.

The focus of the story is a sanatorium that is familiar to readers of ‘Human Traces’, Faulks’ previous novel about the damages sustained by the mind. It is a contrast to the sort of places that we think we know about in Britain between the wars. We picture long corridors, the smell of disinfectant, ageing men trapped by wartime experiences, ‘The Mad House’. I think it’s a damaging part of British culture that for many people the issue of mental health still plays out against this terrifying backdrop. In ‘Snow Country’ the sanatorium is open, filled with light, clean, welcoming, and a place of learning and exploration. My father told me that there were old men who were committed in Northern England in 1917 who were still there fifty years later – whole lives wasted. The contrast to the sanatorium in ‘Snow Country’ is clear. Schloss Seeblick is a place of research and healing.

 There is a love story. I struggle not to draw back to ‘Birdsong’ at this point, because the long story is full of tenderness in the same way. From 1914 to 1933 there are points when you think some elements might be resolved, and the voices of the characters are so authentic that it’s hard to leave them and put the book down. You root for them.

 There is something that Sebastian Faulks does better than anyone else writing fiction in English at the moment. Since ‘Charlotte Gray’, he has created female characters that are as complete as I have read. In the centre of this story is Lena. Faulks develops her voice in a way that sticks in your head. She begins an almost-orphan, and spends all her life looking for belonging.

How does she do? You’ll have to pick up the book to find out.

The Man Miles

 

Miles The Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

 Sometimes, to really develop an understanding of the life of a great artist, it’s not enough to go to the internet and read Wikipedia. I have listened to the music of Miles Davis for nearly thirty years, more or less since the time of his passing. His mid-period music was a companion to me in my 20s, and the electric era of the late 60s in my 30s. I knew only a little of his life and his development.

It has been long overdue, but this spring I bought The Autobiography, rolled up my literary sleeves (do I have those?) and dived in.

Miles’ autobiography is a remarkable doorstep of a book. It is a little over 400 pages in paperback, and considering he died in his mid-60s it is a record of an amazingly full life. I can’t say a well-lived life, because Miles admitted frequently that he made lots of mistakes. His output, however, was prodigious despite several years in isolation and a similar period handicapped by heroin in the early 1950s.

This book comes with an elephant-sized caveat: it is written as Miles spoke it, full of swearing. In a similar way to Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’, in the end you stop seeing the language and listen to the voice. I’d like to know more about how much time Quincy Troupe took putting the contents of the book together, and how he came around to deciding how much to include and what to omit. It’s Miles’ voice coming through loud and clear, and because of that it’s such an important book for the history of music. It’s interesting to find out that as well as being a biographer, Troupe is a poet.

Miles began his life in East St Louis, and it is an important part of his life that his parents were successful, wealthy people. His father was a doctor and politically active, and his mother musical. He was lucky to learn music at the right place at the right time, and Miles was taught by Elwood Buchanan, his first teacher and mentor. Buchanan was important in helping Miles to find his musical voice, to the extent that he is credited right at the end of the book and not forgotten. From East St Louis Miles made a series of fortunate choices and began his musical journey in New York City in 1944, where he met Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. They became the Holy Trinity of Bebop, and ultimately of all jazz. Bird died young, a victim of excess, but Dizzy and Miles remained friends throughout their lives.

It might be easy to assume that Miles’ talent was God-given and that he didn’t have to work at it. The book makes it abundantly clear that Miles was a student of music for all of his fifty years of playing. He studied at Julliard in New York, read music, and read and listened widely to a wide range of musicians.

His first great period was from 1944 until 1949. He was a few months too young to be involved in the Second World War. In immediate post-war New York, he was right at the centre of a vibrant melting pot of new ideas. Miles makes it clear that this initial period was joyous, and changed quickly when the audience changed from largely a black population to returning GIs, the latter of whom wanted to be entertained rather than to listen.

Drugs played a big part in Miles’ life and he is honest in his assessment of how damaging they were for him. Like Bird, he developed a heroin habit in 1949 and spiralled downward into addiction. He did not emerge from the swamp until 1954. From 1954, with his health returning to him and a creative spark of new collaborations, he entered a period of breath-taking creativity. Right through to the early 1960s, he was at the forefront of amazing music. He spoke so warmly of his collaboration with Gil Evans in this period, and called him his best friend.

Something that confused me about the book is how the process of creating his greatest music is not at the centre of the text. Instead, he tended to talk about the musicians and the revolving door of talented performers that he used to create the sound he needed. He quickly became a leader. I had expected a deeper dissection of the process of recording, for example, ‘Kind of Blue’.

Opinions vary, but I think his greatest recording is ‘InA Silent Way’ from 1969. I have returned to the album many times over the last twenty years. I would love to have seen more about how he recorded it.

The second great trial of his life, after beating heroin, was a retirement in the mid to late 70s and a hermit-lie existence dominated by cocaine. As with heroin, he is blunt and honest about the mistakes he made and the way he managed to pull himself up and out of a dark time. He is generous in the way he acknowledged the support of friends and partners, but clear that in the end he had to make the decision himself to step back into the world and clean up.

Miles’ book is dominated by race. He doesn’t mince his words. It is impressive how his thoughts, written in the late 80s, are still on the mark today. He would despair at the racism that has overtaken America in the latest wave of fascist Trump ideology. The dominant theme for Miles was that the creativity of people of colour was always appropriated by white promoters, and the originators disenfranchised. Any time that a studio head could replace an original voice of colour with a white face, he would do. Hindsight reveals that it has happened many times since Chet Baker was promoted as a sanitised alternative to the real geniuses of jazz and is still happening today. Miles’ brutal put-down of the grinning hangers-on when he was invited to a dinner at Reagan’s White House was brilliant and intelligent.

In the final quarter of the book Miles ruminated on the future of music. He recognised that Jimi Hendrix was a musician with the same spirit as him, and they were close to collaboration before Jimi’s untimely death. And finally, in a far-sighted look into the future, Miles chose Prince as his worthy successor. That says everything you need to know about how well he understood music and knew what would last and what would fade away.

He was a musical forefather, largely unrecognised today, who needs to be studied and discussed far more widely. The current soul-searching by the Biden administration as they pick over the smouldering wreckage of Trumpism should be an opportunity to re-evaluate. Maybe all music students should be asked to study Miles as closely as Mozart.

Four pages before the end of his book, he said,

“I think the schools should teach the kids about jazz and black music. Kids should know that America’s only real cultural contribution is the music that our black forefathers brought from Africa which was changed and developed here. African music should be studied as much as European (‘classical’) music”.

England’s greatest hero

 

England’s greatest hero

In England, and probably Britain, we have a strange regard to the heroes. Possibly because of the influence of Shakespeare, and probably because of the abiding strength of Victorian historians, many people are unable to look further than our monarchs for heroes. The shadow of Shakespeare’s fictionalisation of Henry V is long. The field is narrowed considerably by the fact that so few women have held power in the last thousand years.

It was only in the Twentieth Century that some revision began, as different heroes presented themselves, and a study of history based on research and fact rather than embroidered hearsay emerged. A modern view of heroism began to include commoners – great people who were remembered for action, not status. A look at who graces our banknotes in the Twenty-First Century is instructive.

In recent times a reassessment of colonial history and the sins of empire have already started to further refine our pantheon of heroes, removing some and adding others. For all the achievements in his long life, perhaps Winston Churchill’s legacy is not as certain today as it was fifty years ago. The administrators of India such as Clive and Canning are already resigned to the murky backwaters of what Britons can accept as the face of our shared history.

Another distortion of the way history is considered is that some eras are obsessed over at the expense of others. It is a fault of history teaching in England that there is such focus on the Tudor dynasty – a nasty, corrupt and short-lived episode in our story. As both World Wars ebb from living memory, our obsession with the valour of its combattants and its subsequent distorting of our idea of our place in the world continues. The time between the Second World War and today is nearly the same span as that war to the Crimean, but one look at our newspapers would make you think it is only twenty years ago. That is not to denigrate any of the great sacrifice of the wartime generation, and the lessons learned should continue to be taught to our children – the evidence of forgetting them has been painfully obvious in recent times. But to focus so much on it sidelines important understanding of the European revolutions, Napoleon, Catherine the Great, the land grab of North America and so many other events we really should know much more about.

In a time when the whole notion of what it means to be English, or British, or European, is up for grabs and there is a great narrowing of understanding and appreciation of the history of our islands, the longer view is as important as it has ever been. The tired old assumptions of island power, unconquerable realms and Victorian daring-do persist. Who can possibly understand what it means to be English when England as a kingdom has not existed for over three hundred years? How can we get a sense of the fractured, uncertain and ever-changing historical landscape when a large number of people still believe England has remained unbeaten on the field of battle since 1066? It’s the same tunnel vision that helps football fans to believe that England are somehow still world beaters when there is only one world championship winning team in seventy years of trying.

 

Enter a real hero, untainted by modern nationalism, unadopted for political capital, and from a period of history so little explored that nearly all of it is educational. You won’t find his name in school history books, and his name does not appear at the airport book stands alongside the habitual subjects worshipped by Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir.

His name was William Marshall. He was not a king. However, his achievements are so impressive that he ought to be on page one, pushing Henry VIII and his boring wives well down the national conversation.

The most recent book about his long life was written by Thomas Asbridge in 2014. If you really want to pick up lots of information about an unglamorous but fascinating corner of English history (and French, Welsh and Irish history for that matter) then I advise you to start here. Asbridge has written a book that is so readable that it is a pleasure to move from chapter to chapter. He is one of a new breed of historians who do not need to semi-fictionalise his writing to sell copies.

The achievements of William Marshall are so lengthy that it is difficult to summarise theme briefly. Some statistics begin to do him justice: he served five anointed Angevin monarchs from Henry II to Henry III. He was almost executed by King Stephen at the age of five, as a hostage and bargaining chip. He travelled to the Holy Land. He was the greatest Tournament Champion of his age and was known throughout Western Europe for his prowess. He was the only man to better Richard the Lionheart in single combat. He was a servant of monarchs for fifty years, and lived into his seventies in a time when most men were dead at forty. At the age of seventy he led the charge intobattle to protect the interests of the boy king Henry III – and won.

The eye-opening facts keep coming. Starting out as the undervalued son of a minor landowner, his service caused him to rise first to knight, then to personal retainer of the son of the king, to regent of England and guardian of the realm. All through those years of service, he retained an amazing knack for steering a careful political course that largely avoided falling from favour for any of the five monarchs he served, and to be respected on all sides of the many turbulent events of the late Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries.

Near the end of his life, he was instrumental in the construction of the Magna Carta and its successful re-writing and employment.

This is the kind of hero who should be discussed in the Twenty-First Century. If nothing else, a study of his life and times will teach people just how fragile and impermanent our place on these islands has always been. It will add to our understanding of the ties that have bound England to Normandy and France for centuries, and why that is still important. The place of Wales and Ireland in our island history also has important roots in Marshall’s times, and some of his actions have echoes many hundreds of years later.

He is a hero from a time of different values and understanding of the world, but he remains a hero because of his honesty, faithfulness and service. His story deserves to be known by everyone who wants to know about English history. His example needs to be heeded by those who attempt to lead us today.