Mind Dump and Other Jargon

The presentation seemed to go passably well. No PowerPoint problems and my timing was precise enough. Quite enjoyed it actually. Bloody knackered afterwards though, because I had been up through the night finishing off my assignment for Shakespeare Studies. Bad planning? Well yes, to a degree, but also the latest manifestation of the way I work best. I cannot help remembering with affection the greatest day of my professional life, 20 December 2002. Sleep was unattainable so I got up and spread some 600 pages of legal documents around the floor of my hotel room and checked through them all one last time. A hearty early breakfast and I was at the solicitors' office in advance of the opposition. I convinced the bemused receptionist to let me into the boardroom and there I was sipping my second cup of good coffee in the best chair in the room when the others arrived. I was out by lunchtime, deal done, clients considerably richer and well chuffed with myself. Most unusually for a lawyer, that night I slept what felt like the sleep of the innocent. On harsh reflection I probably should have quit there and then while still ahead. Marvellous thing 20/20 hindsight.

My presentation included explanation of the coffee/bananas/big piece of paper school of writing. The piece of paper has now filled up and, for want of a better phrase, I am afraid we must term this the completion of my mind-dumping episode. 'Mind-dump' does not appear in the OED but it does graphically, if inelegantly, describe the process of depositing ideas good and bad and clearing the mind for the task of sifting them for value. The sifting has now produced its first fruit. I have a 1954 word Stage Outline around which I am going to write the scenes. I also have the outline of some casting and character notes which explain the multiple roles. I have settled on eight actors and I am still keeping Adam and Nina in character throughout. All the rest have at least three incarnations. Some of the doublings are quite pleasing  - Father Rothschild/Miles Malpractice is nicely potent; Vanburgh/King of Ruritania nicely speculates on the dismal prospects of aristocracy.

In writing the Outline I have been most occupied with getting the characters from one place to the next and taking the plot with them without causing whacking great changes of scenery. The three act structure discussed earlier on this blog is still in place which means no linear plot although each act does hopefully build to its own little climax - Balcairn's suicide in Act I, Adam's sacking as Chatterbox in Act II, and Agatha Runcible's funeral (my addition to the text) in Act III. At the moment I envisage a Prologue which shows Adam 'selling' Nina to Ginger to cover his bill at Shepheard's and an Epilogue comprising the book's battlefield 'Happy Ending'. I am adding Vanburgh, by now finding a strange fulfillment in war correspondence, to the Epilogue and have found some nice lines from Sword of Honour which describe the ironic blessing of war for a lost generation and which I will put in his mouth,

But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the modern age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle. (Men at Arms, p11)



It does not address quite the problems of plotting that I am dealing with but I have been handily reminded just how adroit stage writing can be by the amateur production of Ayckbourn's Table Manners with which I am assisting back stage this week. It is one part of a trilogy of plays which cover the same people over the same weekend but which each stand up as individual plays. Enormously clever and also very funny. The words 'East Grinstead' are made to have tremendous comic effect. Mindful of my final degree assignments I declined the chance to read for a part in this production but watching it from the wings and confined to carting props on and off stage, I must confess to envying the actors. The part of Norman gives particular scope for theatrical showing-off.

Ayckbourn's Table Manners

Stage directions. Less is more? This has been vexing me a little as I construct scenes. Because I can see in my mind's eye what I intend, it is very tempting to inscribe the page with every little preferred twitch and nuance. But that is heavy on the word count (remembering that I have to have something vaguely interesting to hand in six weeks from now) and also ignores a beguiling feature of theatre,

When we work in the other direction - that is, from the telling to the showing mode, especially from print to performance - a definitional problem potentially arises. In a very real sense, every live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance. The text of a play does not necessarily tell an actor about such matters as the gestures, expressions, and tones of voice to use in converting words on a page into a convincing performance; it is up to the director and and actors to actualize the text and to interpret and then recreate it, thereby in a sense adapting it for the stage. (Hutcheon, p39)

So, yes, less is more. But then again I need to communicate my decisions as to how the cast should be arranged on stage. I do want some entrances and exits but I think I also want the players to return to the stage when not participating. These conflicting desires are a recipe for muddle. It's make your mind up time.

For a brief flavour of the labour, here are the Prologue and Epilogue extracted from the Outline,

 PROLOGUE


A is back at Shepheard’s and Lottie presents him with his bill for £76. He writes a dud cheque. Ginger then arrives to confront A about his carrying on with N. They haggle and A sells his share in N to Ginger for enough to cover his cheque. A telephones N to admit the transaction – ‘Goodbye Adam my sweet. But I think you’re rather a cad.’...

EPILOGUE


V regains his lofty perch but now sports a tin helmet and films with a cine camera. On a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in history Adam sits and reads a letter from N (p186). Around the stage lie the dead. From out of the gloom a figure looms. A is wary, as is the approaching figure. However they recognize each other as English. In fact the newcomer is the drunken Major, now sober and promoted to General. He gives A a cheque for £35000, now practically worthless (quantitative easing). As they leave to search for the Major’s car Vanburgh approaches them. They are, he announces, heroes and he will report their gallantry to those still alive at home. The Major laments war, but both V and A assert that they have done worse things.

A New Skillset (should that have a hyphen, is it even a word?)

Forward progress towards a legible script, as opposed to the ill-assorted proto-scenes, has necessarily been arrested by the looming (two days and counting) necessity to present to my peer group on the project so far. This presentation will be the subject of our interim assessments.

same as it ever was

In fact preparing the presentation has been a useful cause of a wholesale review of my efforts thus far. The jury's verdict is 'same as it ever was' (David Byrne circa 1980 - Google is witholding the correct date from me, must be something I typed) because I have conducted myself just as I did through my business career, that is to say diligently but haphazardly. I am put in mind of the Irish rugby player who described the team's position after a bad defeat as being 'hopeless but not serious.'  My clients became used to my methods imitating a high-wire act without a safety net. I never fell off, but there is of course always a tomorrow. Or to be quite precise, in this case there is a day after tomorrow.

Standing up and delivering the presentation will make me mildly but usefully nervous. Previous life has equipped me for that part of the ordeal. What I am hugely uneasy about is the validity of my intellectual positions. 'Hyper-sensitive' would probably be the apt expression. If someone takes umbrage at my views, will I hit him (not her, the code of the Woosters forbids hitting women) or, more likely, will I succumb to a mortified sulk? This is too, too nerve making as Agatha Runcible might put it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

However (touch wood - quite genuinely I have just touched the desk, absurd isn't it) I yesterday mastered my Powerpoint phobia. It is a tool I have experience of using but generally as the smug end-user. I have been used to having people who magically cause to come out of computers that which I desire. This used to be my precious secretary Sue (same one for twenty years bless her - people get less for murder) and these days it is my daughters who come to my aid. Well, with the glorious heedlessness of youth Rachel is working hard at university in London and has assignments of her own, while Helen has buggered off to Adelaide. So yesterday I taxed my wife's patience by plundering her knowledge of the software and eventually negotiated my own unorthodox way round the task my mind had set. We have a presentation. No bells. No whistles but hopefully a useful addendum to what I will say. I've obeyed the first rule of technology (ie what can break will) and structured the talking so that it will work on its own if necessary. Which is not to say I won't be mightily cheesed off if the screen goes blank on me.  

What will I say? I'm not going to put the whole text up here I don't think although I may investigate learning how to insert a link to it and/or the Powerpoint. It will go a bit like this

• a brief critical history of Waugh and of VB in particular
• personal comments on the importance (but not paramountcy) of his catholicism
• why a stage adaptation? (Answer, why not?)
• dramatising the undramatisable, reference to Antony and Cleopatra and to King Lear, both of which I have seen in the past two weeks and about which I will write separately
• players; props; costume; scenery
• three act structure
• the Roberts method: coffee, bananas, large paper

And if things have gone passably well I have a very weak joke to finish with. What can possibly go wrong?

Bright Young Things

Supervision with DR this morning. He was too canny not to notice that I talked more about Shakespeare than Waugh but seemed content to let me continue my non-linear progress to a product. I tried out the thematic three act structure on him and he observed that the boat could be added to my list of death machines. Not sure, taking it under advisement as American lawyers say, whatever it may mean.

Following on from yesterday's jottings, I've bought two new marker pens and I've just used them for the first time. It begins to look as if we have a plan. Also kept up the coffee and banana intake and broke up the day with some unwisely vigorous exercise (see vulgar blog). One aside - I spoke yesterday about writers' papers and libraries and blow me if I haven't heard the same topic twice under discussion on Radio 4 today, prompted by Le Carre's donation of his archive to the Bodleian - Le Carre Donation. It sounds like he is an inveterate amender.

Just finished watching the Stephen Fry Bright Young Things film. Not bad. Not great. So my opinion seems to accord with the general view, which of itself is rather unusual. I did think it particularly well cast and Fenella Woolgar is the dead spit of how I imagine Agatha Runcible. Father Rothschild is reduced to a cameo and James McAvoy is particularly affecting as Balcairn. However not at all sold on the new happy ending. I know it is treasonous ever to disagree with Fry, but I think he misses the point. Bleakness is all in Waugh. Even Guy Crouchback at the culmination of Sword of Honour, who has by common accord 'had a good war', has done at so at great cost to his faith and to his country.

Which brings me to intertextuality. My tentative titles for my three acts are the titles of the three parts of Sword of Honour. As I have previously alluded there is a recurrent darkness in Waugh which envelops both the satires and the later sterner works. Fry does some borrowing from the wartime trilogy when he uses an air-raid to produce his denouement, albeit he disowns the text's pessimism. Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd) inherits the Canadian/Beaverbrook vulgarity we find in Rex Mottram (a man to whom war is kind) in Brideshead Revisited.

Fry handles the book's tricky final wartime scene by transplanting it to 1940 Belgium but this conflicts with the period detail which has so deftly placed the action a decade earlier. It also renders incongruous what might otherwise have been a nice little Wallis Simpson joke earlier in the film. All of which sounds rather carping now I look at it again. On balance I would have enjoyed the film far more had I not known the book - this remark could bring us back to musings on the nature and validity of adaptation but we will save that for another day.

In a way I have to admit that I am glad not to find the film a roaring success. It leaves some room for the rest of us to have a pop.        

Conteporary Reviews Of Vile Bodies

L.P. Hartley in Saturday Review 25 January 1930 (reprinted in Stannard, p97)

If we read this high-spirited book between the lines and look its gift-horse humour in the mouth, we may find that the ground is not really solid beneath our feet; we are dancing on a precipice ... 'Posterity will laugh,' a distinguished contemporary poet bitterly observed, 'when it reads about the age in which I have had to live.' I have sometimes doubted whether it will; but if (as might easily happen) it has Mr Waugh's book to turn to, it may have its laugh after all.

This is rather the line I come at the book with but the reviews were not uniformly complimentary and some of the more caustic comments do highlight the novel's weaknesses.

Arnold Bennett Evening Standard 29 January 1930 (Stannard, 99)

Mr Waugh's subject is the silly set, more commonly known as the smart set - social, pseudo-artistic, pseudo-literary, and genuinely alcoholic, the set which is always trying to run away from the shadow of its own fundamental stupidity. An easy subject. None of the satire in this book is unjust, but some of it is extremely, wildly farcical, and bits of it would not induce laughter in Lord Brentford. I began Vile Bodies with great expectations, and found hard times in the middle of it.

(Lord Brentford was, as Sir William Joynson Hicks, an evangelist and teetotal Conservative Home Secretary) This is a fair critique of the lack of structure to the novel and of some scenes which are surplus even in this short book. Richard Aldington in The Sunday Referee of 9 February (Stannard, 102) said much the same but his conclusion does hint at why I think the text had value in its time and, rather paradoxically, still does now,

Above all I like Mr Waugh's unpretentiousness. There are so many people writing immortal works for posterity that it is very pleasant to find a writer of really superior gifts who is content to write about a little bit of his own time for his own time. And you never can tell - Candide and Dr Akakia were squibs.

Consider the list of the encumbrances Aldington admits Waugh's generation had to bear. Then read today's newspapers. Deafening echoes,

They were ushered into life during one of the meanest and most fraudulent decades staining the annals of history. And it's still going on - forgery, fraudulent bankruptcy, false banknotes [for which I suggest the modern reader should substitute 'quantitative easing' - DHR] intensive commercial warfare, lying conferences to deceive the nations' demand for peace ... No; I don't think we can blame the 'Young.' I certainly should not, even if they were all as silly and futile as the fantoches in Mr Waugh's satire. 

So, notwithstanding the impression I may give, no I don't blame the young. I'm just relieved they don't too violently blame me. All of which has rather wandered off my point. Which was? To hint (inarticulately) at why I'm doing this. I'm floundering today but here's a little pearl picked up by this little piggy,

There must be something to generate tension, something to create complication, without any conscious attempt on the playwright's part to do so. There must be a force which will unify all parts, a force out of which they will grow as naturally as limbs grow from the body. We think we know what that force is: human character, in all its infinite ramifications and dialectical contradictions. (Egri, xx)

All of which is rather marvellous but, on close analysis, does fall foul of the Sybil Fawlty test (see 21 February) - incidentally it is Sybil with an 'S' not a 'C', I checked.

So character, character, character. Having earlier said that many of Waugh's vast army of characters are interchangeable one might venture I have encountered a blind alley. Not so. I have already committed (at least until I change my mind) to a cull cum amalgamation of characters and I think there is enough there to compile a drama.

Evelyn Waugh 1930

In an earlier entry I likened this exercise to a commercial transaction - large piece of paper, coffee, bananas. The piece of paper is up on the wall (5' x 3' or 150 x 90 in new money) and already bears a brief summary of each chapter of the book. Tomorrow I will buy some new marker pens to add the headings of my three act structure (see below). Coffee - in Anglesey I had the luxury of Java (a gift from my eleven year old niece who has, I suspect, now reached an age where she no longer buys my eccentric guru act) but here (came home this afternoon) it is Sainsbury's Basic ground coffee. I guess this is the stuff they sweep up off the factory floor but it tastes ok to me and is not the dreaded instant. Bananas - one a day for the last three days. I cannot put off any longer the messy phase. The preliminary reading is done (I love and get stuck in that part) and now I need to create vast piles of paper, most importantly what I will mark 'WVi' (that is 'working version 1') and on which I will scrawl, delete, re-scrawl, delete, re-re-scrawl etc until I am ready for WVii. At the end of a nice tasty company sale I used to permit myself the luxury of scanning through the accumulated 'working versions' of the SPA (sorry, sale and purchase agreement) - from them I could reconstruct the history of the negotiations/arguments/vehement assertions/hubris/retractions/blind panic/elation/sheer bloody relief. Not sexy but illuminating if you know what you're looking for. I imagine this is why American universities are such assiduous buyers of literary archives. I hope modern authors are keeping copies of their discarded drafts. What else will their executors have to sell when the tax man calls?

Provisional headings for my three acts: Act I (the parties): Unconditional Surrender; Act II (hotels): Officers and Gentlemen; Act III (weapons of destruction): Men at War. Which for those who have been paying attention will eventually bring us on to intertextuality. But that is for another day. There are vast piles of paper to be created. I have marked particular passages which can be the basis of scenes and the continuing task is to reduce these to script. This uncollated, unconnected mass will be the WVi on which I scrawl. On the wall chart will go reminders/observations of a more general or structural nature.       

Three Act Structure

I'm here in writing camp on Anglesey and I've been thinking about three act structures. Vile Bodies might be said to be filmic in that it has a rush of swift scenes and tying this down for the stage is challenging. Many years ago I was taken to see a stage version of Singin' In The Rain (Tommy Steele from memory), a musical which had its roots in film and which depends for its comic effect on a large number of visual gags - 'Dignity, always dignity' spoken over clips of cinematic pratfalls. This was a high ticket production and I remember being faintly disappointed that it was a very faithful transplant (almost scene for scene) of the film. One which necessarily depended on frequent and massively expensive (one assumes) changes of scenery and costume. Neither can be appropriate for my project. By the way it was Tommy Steele, I've just found the cast recording artwork, reproduced above.

Aside from Vile Bodies my reading here has been Antony and Cleopatra which is catching my attention for my Shakespeare module. This is relevant because it is a play which makes outrageous leaps of time and place and sports a vast cast of characters - 39 speaking parts, not to mention sundry 'eunuchs, courtiers, attendants, captains, servants.' Yet it is the dialogue that matters and the lack of identifying scenery (dictated by practicality) can focus the audience's attention on the text. One might argue that Vile Bodies is so much of its time (certainly Waugh himself does not seem to have granted it any wider pertinence) that the accoutrements of its era are going to be needed in dramatisation but I would argue that the tone of the language can be sufficient to fix the action where the dramatist requires. In any event some of the themes of Vile Bodies might actually be better served if taken out of the very specific context of the extraordinary era in which it was written. I think that what I am trying to say here is that Vile Bodies can validly be dramatised with a bare stage and minimal props and might actually be all the more effective for it. What I am not saying is that I am the man to do it, but I have rather backed myself into the corner of having to try!

Stating the bleeding obvious

Antony and Cleopatra does not observe the classic unity of time but it does at least have a linear plot, no flashbacks etc. Here's an example of stating the bleeding obvious (which anoraks amongst you will recall was Basil Fawlty's suggestion for Sybil's specialist subject if she ever went on Mastermind) but the reason Shakespeare can carry this off is that he was the greatest writer in English. Ever. Full stop. Waugh does not come remotely close so liberties can quite legitimately be taken, indeed will be. Which brings me back, at last, to three act structure. Having established that there is a massive gulf between Shakespeare and Waugh and that there is an even more chasmic gulf separating Waugh from me, we can settle for an orthodox three act structure because that will be comprehensible to an intended audience and because the material cannot carry a structure as daring as Antony and Cleopatra. Which I think brings us neatly back to Sybil Fawlty.

So what I propose is this: we will play fast and loose with the linear plot on the ground that the order in which things happen is not quite so important to Waugh's themes as the fact that they do happen. His is not a vision of cause and effect, but rather a nihilistic and profoundly deterministic one. His Bright Young Things are on a doomed trajectory they are unequipped (and uninclined) to alter. I think one can argue that this remains true of his later 'serious' novels just as much it is true of the frivolous comic novels. Who (at least among the bloke classes I inhabit) does not want to shout at Ryder or Crouchback, 'Do something you fairy!'

Three acts, not linked temporally but each bearing its own common theme. Firstly, the parties attended by the protagonists - Archie Schwert's party (the rump of which decamps to Downing Street), the Metroland party which provokes Balcairn's suicide. Secondly, hotels: principally Shepheard's Hotel, where Adam successively makes and loses a fortune, where a showgirl unimportantly dies; secondarily the glum hotel in Arundel where Adam and Nina consort unmovingly. Thirdly, battlefields both literal and figurative, that is the concluding apocalyptic war and, prefiguring it, the motor racing circuit.

So what we have so far is a conjectured three act structure, three themes and a lot of dialogue. I am groping towards a largely bare stage onto which small items of staging can be carried. As for costume changes, I want to keep the cast to a minimum and I am toying with there being a clothes rack at the back of the stage so that the supporting cast/chorus make their changes of costume/character in audience view. This latter device thus emphasising the superficiality of the differences between the personnel in view. 

The Beginning of the Beginning

There is a new character to whom you need to be introduced. This will be confusing because his name is David Roberts. He is Professor David Roberts and he is supervising this academic project, more at David Roberts Profile. Henceforth he will appear as DR.

DR made a nice suggestion that I consider the use of the gossip writers as narrative glue. He then makes an even more intriguing proposal that they should both become war correspondents at the end of the story. But what to do with Balcairn's suicide? Tomorrow's problem. For today have actually started writing a scene (at the Archie Schwert party) in which the two writers converse (see Vile Bodies p42 et seq) but I have added Adam to the conversation with a view to alluding to his extant troubles ie the loss of his manuscript, the onerous publishing contract and his rejection by Nina. These troubles might be expected to form the centre of the drama but, of course, they do not. They are just things that happen while life spins on around the vile bodies. By the end of the night the party will have cartwheeled its way to a denouement in Downing Street via a death at Shepheard's Hotel. A young girl is unimportantly dead, an unimportant Prime Minister will be removed from office and Agatha Runcible will pronounce the events 'all too bogus' (Vile Bodies p49).

The Epigraph

Waugh chose this as the epigraph for Vile Bodies, taken from Through the Looking Glass,

'Well in our country,' said Alice , still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

'If I wasn't real,' Alice said - half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous - 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'

'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. 

So, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing perhaps? A world running to stand still certainly. But signifying nothing? As I reread Vile Bodies yet again I come more and more to be chilled. It is frenetic and consistently funny (this, I think is what I got out of it when I first read it in my teens) but resolutely bleak. The episode of Adam and Nina's tryst in Arundel (Chapter Five) is typical. Within a page the deflowered Nina both casually damns physical love, 'My dear, I never hated anything so much in my life ... still, as long as you enjoyed it that's something' (VB p69) and yet wistfully and sweetly hints at a genuine affection neither is programmed to accommodate - 'It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.' (p70). This bleakness does signify. It matters and although the particular milieu which produced it is long gone, it is possible to detect modern resonance. Take for example the centrality to the plot of the gossip columnists (one of whom poignantly, but of course comically, kills himself at the book's turn) who half fabricate their news and yet have a symbiotic relationship with their prey. The bright young things really have nothing but their hedonistic celebrity. Sound familiar? 

The frenzy and the comedy are a gift to adaptation.There is a lot of good dialogue with potential for transplant straight to the stage. The underlying darkness is more challenging. Should it be hammered home or  do we trust the consumer to work it out? The latter I think, but what to do about that difficult final chapter? More to follow.

Problems. I mention the abundance of great dialogue. This is good. It is put in the mouths of a vast army of characters. This is bad. I count twenty-four characters in the first dozen pages. So the first big decision is a a practical one. Severe pruning of the number of characters will have to be done but I am considering giving supporting players multiple roles. This device would be openly acknowledged, in fact I favour the mutation being in full view on occasions. A feature of the characters is that many of them are cast from similar moulds and when they talk to each other they might very well be conversing with themselves. A conversation between the two impecunious aristocratic gossip writers conducted through the medium of a single actor might be intriguing. This line of thought dictates that I will need a very large expanse of paper on which to plan. I can't run to a whiteboard so the plan is to take down the family pictures on the far wall of my study and to tack up rolls of lining paper. This is how I am accustomed to working. As much material in single sight as possible, lines connecting disparate elements, Post It stickers everywhere. That is how I used to run a company sale. That and lots of coffee. Good stuff mind, none of your instant. Oh and bananas. You need bananas.

Finally a defence of adaptation which I have found reassuring as I seek to interfere with an established cultural artefact,

an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative - a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing.

(Hutcheon p9)