On being a child of one's generation, redux.

I hate the way Sir Thomas Malory writes Gawain. I am used to Chretien de Troies's easy-going, charming Gawain -- "the Ladies' Knight" because he acquires a new lady-love in each story he appears in -- who occupies the position of Top Knight in King Arthur's court by virtue of being Arthur's sister's eldest son,* of being the best fighter out of the normal members of the court (as I recall, he is once knocked off his horse by Perceval in "Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal"; once battles Yvain to a weary sundown truce in "Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion"; and otherwise handily defeats all rivals), of being both brave and level-headed (brave enough to join Lancelot's quest to save the Queen in "Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la Charrette" (sp?) without Lancelot's ulterior motive, level-headed enough not to charge the preoccupied Perceval but speak to him. In both these instances, Kay plays the rasher, more anti-social reflection of Gawain's good impulses, and is rewarded by being kidnapped himself in the first and having his arm broken in the second). He is the Compleat Knight, pious in measure and worldly without corruption, a fine fighter who fights without regret and so bold a lover, he is the only knight willing to woo a woman with dark hair (the marvelous Lunete, first adviser to Yvain's wife in "Yvain")! He is not always right -- his advice that Yvain leave his wife immediately after the wedding to go questing is obviously foolish, and nearly leads Yvain to lose her altogether -- and he is not always successful (each tale must have its own hero, and he is the hero of none). But he is clearly, and appropriately, Top Knight. And he is a terrible charmer to boot. Chretien wrote in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. By the Prose Lancelot Gawain remains Top Knight at Arthur's court, but has been thoroughly displaced in the heart of the reader by Lancelot, who to this day is enshrined as Official Top Knight in popular culture. The triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere is central to many modern depictions (as to the third section of the Prose Lancelot, the section I read many years ago under the title The Death of King Arthur in Penguin, unless I'm totally mixed up), and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" mentions the name "Gawain" only to offer him to one beast or another -- the ravenous rabbit, I believe. To Malory in 1475, Gawain has nothing of the Top Knight about him at all. He is viler than anything in Chretien's world, even the enemies. He is probably about the tenth-best fighter, but easily and plainly outclassed by Lancelot, Tristan, Lamorak (!! Perceval's older brother; in Chretien's tale, Perceval's elder brothers all died when he was a child and achieved no great fame), Palomides (Tristan's self-declared rival, the pagan knight who also loves Yseut la Blonde), and probably several others including his own younger brother Gareth, whom he doesn't fight directly, at least as far as I've gotten. (Somewhere not so very far into Book II.) He is called "the Ladies' Knight" not because all the ladies love him but because at nineteen he swears a special oath of protection to ladies after having accidentally chopped off a lady's head in a chapel instead of her lover's/. Chretien's Gawain is patient enough to suffer abuse at the hands of ladies who pronounce him a merchant wearing armor to avoid taxes because he does not fight in a tournament as a true knight would, and not fight at the tournament because it would be foolish to risk a wound when he is on a quest; Malory's Gawain is so angered by others' acknowledged superiority that his brother ends up killing their mother.** And on, and on. I have little patience with the elevation of Tristan (and less with the spelling "Tristram") to a high place at Arthur's court; I love Tristan and Yseut but they are a different story. I have other quarrels with Malory: even so strange a tongue he can render samey and sing-songy. But my real problem is how he treats Gawain. And this is where the title of this post comes in. Upon being struck by how difficult this actually made it for me to keep reading at a certain point, I thought: "So this is how it feels to have a headcanon." * Sister's son has long been recognized as a place of special honor in Arthurian legend: Tristan is also Mark's sister's son, and his maltreatment at Mark's hands is rendered especially bitter by the expectations his narratively special place has set. ** Lamorak's tourney victory enrages Gawain who believes Lamorak the killer of G's father Lot, so G persuades his brother Gaheris to follow Lamorak -- it turns out, to a tryst with their mother Morgause, where Lamorak denies having killed Lot. Gaheris announces that it would be unchivalrous to murder a naked knight and promptly kills his mother instead.

On the subtle delights of teaching.

One of my favorite moments is always the moment when I can shrug and say, "Well, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and have my students get it.

On Mike Leigh on Gilbert & Sullivan.

Before my mom and I went out to see "Topsy-Turvy" in ... January 2000? ... I never went to the movies, but afterwards I finally realized both that people were still making things worth watching and that other people's attempts to sort through it all could be of serious help to me in deliberation, not just to follow what was going on. Even if I hadn't remembered it clearly I would have remembered it very fondly. Therefore, having seen in the Journal that Criterion was putting out a sparkly new disc, h&I checked it out some time ago. I loved it when I first saw it, but I got a lot more out of it this time. More than ten years have passed, and I did not remember the sequence of events; but the scenes and themes I remembered were subtler and much more closely integrated than I had first experienced. I've only seen one other Mike Leigh film, because I can't deal with depressing movies, which seems to be his forte, but both of these are special, individual, wonderful movies, and I'll have to take the plunge into the harsher works some time.

What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.

(1) In re: William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, it forgives them individually their unpleasantness and -- harder in narrative art -- their unhappiness, and it convincingly depicts a relationship between two men who as people could hardly be less in sympathy, who don't much like or -- except qua artists -- respect each other, yet whose tense and volatile working relationship produces works (leaving aside entirely their very high quality) of miraculous collaborative coherence.

(2) With regard to everyone else, it accepts them. It is clear and harsh on their failings -- Grossmith and ... whichever character plays the Mikado (the actor's named Timothy Spall, I think. Oh, the character's Richard Temple) sarcastically wave away Durward Lely's anti-imperialist comments, Lely throws a fit when asked to perform without a corset under his Japanese robe,* Jessie Bond and Leonora Braham date as cynically as a Caitlin Flanagan nightmare, practically everyone is using alcohol or drugs and showing other signs of not quite keeping it together, there are the usual prigs and sycophants. They aren't exemplars of Victorian hypocrisy and they aren't emblems of universal human character types. They're just people we recognize well enough that we only need a few glimpses of each.

As to G&S ... Sullivan is the very type of the anguished Victorian hypocrite. He courts respectability and the aura of high art with an energy and insecurity second only to that he exhausts on gambling, lewd music hall entertainments, prostitutes, and occasionally but vigorously his girlfriend. The only things that rouse him from his harrumphing fog are a woman on the couch and a good review in the paper. Gilbert is a quiet, bourgeois family man, in love with his wife but unable to be satisfied with love, any more than he is satisfied with his success. The outstandingly good reviews of "The Mikado"'s premiere, which send Sullivan into a frenzy of delight, seem only to confirm his mistrust of others' opinions. He is workmanlike and Sullivan acts like a Romantic artistic genius, even though it is Gilbert who recognizes that the work they are producing will last; Sullivan's anxiety to be recognized for his "serious" work still permits him an ecstatic satisfaction in popular acclaim, but Gilbert is like a lifelong astronaut whose tickertape parade only highlights his hollowness when not working. Sullivan lives with the atemporal, unplanned intensity and volatility of a child; Gilbert with a caretaker's weary wariness.

All their interactions are awkward. Each thinks he is constantly sacrificing his own ideas upon the altar of the other's genius. Except that when Gilbert reads his new manuscript to Sullivan -- with a furrowed brow and a dark, dry tone -- Sullivan is overtaken by innocent joy. His pretentious side is far enough in check that the child laughs and laughs at the adult's pretensions skewered, gleeful to see arbitrary conventions exposed as unworthy the attention that in his ordinary life he lovingly and anxiously bestows. When he is by himself it is not obvious that Sullivan would enjoy Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or if he was inclined to enjoy them that he would allow or admit it. When he is laughing at Gilbert's jokes we can suddenly see that his perennially last-minute inspirations come late because he is just that type of person, but come as inspirations because Gilbert brings to him something he loves and can't find in himself without help.

Of course Gilbert comes across as more sympathetic. Gilbert is more sympathetic. He lived soberly and responsibly and lovingly to his wife (not to his estranged mother), without buying into the particular moral and social system of his time and place. A shockingly high proportion of his wit remains clever, and, more shockingly still, some decent proportion passes the further test of -- well -- saying something. He's endlessly quotable and really something of a philosopher -- anyway, a brilliantly attractive formulator of unsound arguments (see: the entire plot of "Patience"). Sullivan is harder. We don't have his words, and by all the evidence he wasn't that great a person. (Who is?) It's hard to come to see them as people making evitable decisions amongst alternative possibilities. At three or four I was horrified to learn that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers hadn't actually been in love. When we get past that, the next step is to focus on the bitterness and failure below the surface -- to treat every pretty face as a mask. It's common enough to stop there. The power of "Topsy-Turvy" grows from its rejection of that dichotomy.


* His prettyboy affect is especially amusing to those of us who, looking back, recognize the actor, Kevin McKidd, as the rough, angular, temperamental soldier struggling towards the middle class that he played in the blood-and-sandals-and-camp-and-soap HBO series "Rome," the pattern for subsequent TV historical melodrama series stuffed and overstuffed with blood and nudity -- a further amusement by contrast with Leigh's technical restraint and imaginative interest in bringing us to the Victorians, rather than showing us the Romans as ourselves.

On space and spaciousness.

I grew up in Brooklyn and have mostly lived in urban areas, and when I am away I notice how my sense of space has been formed by that experience. In Chicago and Toronto the streets seem impossibly broad, there are no tall buildings in Paris, any place not on the water feels lonely and stranded. I don't know how to look at a field; they all look the same to me, though trees and flowers don't. I hate the way farm animals smell and the centralized planning (via zoning laws, community boards, and community pressures) of practically every American suburb.

I have lived in smallish towns of ~20,000-30,000 and found them more congenial: a small walkable area, streets and structures grown up haphazardly, reflecting their centuries; quiet spaces discovered only by the diligent; people of different ages passing and mingling on the streets; real neighborhoods, different in feel from block to block; and much else that is inaccessible but impressive. Distinctly, an overall devotion to pleasant liveability -- by my parochial urbanite's standards, anyway.

These towns (college towns, I should note) have accepted the principle of organized space and spontaneous growth. That is the city principle -- the suburbs are arranged so as to ignore unintended consequences, but cities live and die on the unintended, the planners outwitted by time. When I say that cities grow spontaneously I of course do not mean that they have wills of their own, but that order simply can't be imposed thoroughly for long on such a large number of people and such a large number of groups of people. You can't control all of the changes all of the time.

So the spontaneity of urban growth after all has something of freedom in it. Like weeds bursting through the cracks in a sidewalk the citizens reshape what was given to them.

On the passage of time.

My very first week in college, before I had even turned eighteen, I was asked what my favorite movie was (crowd of strangers seated in a circle, ice-breaking). After a moment I offered "La Strada" and "A Hard Day's Night." An appreciative murmur went up as a couple dozen college kids kicked themselves for not having thought of Fellini.

I can no longer remember what I saw in it. It must be still there (as it were), but I've lost it.

I still think "A Hard Day's Night" is a great movie.

On my misspent youth.

H&I went out to see "Ruddigore" tonight at the Harvard Gilbert&Sullivan Society and I noted every flub & commented on the unusual choice to make Dick Dauntless rather self-aware and intelligent & cooed with praise over their choice to let Rose sing her verse of "Happily coupled are we" & delighted in the comic lead getting the happiest ending for once instead of the principal tenor & sang all the songs to myself all the way home. Next week: "Patience" at MIT Gilbert&Sullivan, I hope. And in the spring "Yeomen" here, and perhaps in winter something in New York, if we can catch it.

One of my students (an astrophysicist with whom I've discussed grad school applications) was violin section chair. I felt very proud of her.