Leacock's Best (mostly)

J.B. Priestley, ed. The Best of Leacock (1958) Just what the title says. I would have included about 2/3rds if the pieces that Priestley chose. He kindly provides an Introduction explaining his choices, which shows that his taste does not include parody, his sense of the absurd is definitely English and not Canadian, and he doesn’t get the rage in Leacock’s satire of the Idle Rich. I think that may be because it’s the one book in which Leacock’s economic insights shape the satire. In some of his shorter pieces, Leacock hints that economics is a social science, and that human motives matter more than the numbers.
     Priestley wants to think of Leacock as the humourous uncle who tells his funny stories with a twinkle in his eye, and doesn’t really mean to be mean to the targets of his satire. This is, I think , a common misreading of Leacock. Under the veneer of absurdity, Acadian Adventures Among the Idle Rich is an angry and precise skewering of the selfishness and greed of what Veblen called the Leisure Class. Leacock goes a step further than Veblen’s careful dissection of the social meaning of conspicuous consumption: He demonstrates that too much money empties the brains of whatever sense and ethics their owners had, leaving behind a vapid desire for social status and the low cunning required to maintain the income-producing enterprises that pay for the pastimes of the idlers. The chapter on the merger of St Asaph and St Osoph is one of the most skillful illuminations of self-delusion and manipulation of ethics in the service of greed that I’ve read. The more serious and verbose attempts of, say, Sinclair Lewis don’t, I think, achieve the same suavely savage effect, certainly not as economically as in Leacock’s satire.
     I enjoyed rereading my favourites, but I skipped a few of the selections. This anthology serves well as an introduction to Leacock, whose work, sadly, has become an acquired taste. I suppose that’s the inevitable fate of humourous and satiric writing, which depends on allusions to a shared popular culture. But if you can find a copy in some second-hand bookshop, it’s worth buying. ***

Black Adder: All the scripts

Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton. Black Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty (1998) We watched the series when it first aired. A wonderfully absurd and intelligent send-up of our notions of the past. History ain’t what we think it is, especially when the Adder clan is part of it.
     Here are all the scripts, with some added material that makes better sense on the page than on the screen. As with all scripts, it helps to have seen the performances. Atkinson, Fry, Robinson et al are superb comic actors with impeccable timing and a large range of tone and sneer. The four Black Adder series are worth watching again and again; many episodes are available on YouTube. The series became increasingly dark, and the last one ends in the fog of war. As with all good satire, the targets are the ones labelled the Seven Deadly Sins in another context. It’s really the weaknesses and flaws of human nature that exercise the spleen of the writers. But I suspect that the weaknesses and flaws are the price we pay for the glory.
     Recommended for addicts; I doubt that the casual reader will find much to amuse them, but I have a faint hope I’m mistaken. ****

Public performance and Murder (Marsh's Opening Night & Swing Brother Swing)

 

Ngaio Marsh. Opening Night (1951). Martyn Tarne has come to England to attempt a career in the theatre. She washes up at the Vulcan Theatre, as Dresser to leading lady Helen Hamilton, whose husband Clark Bennington is rapidly declining into a mean drunk. Tensions among the cast and with the author of the play, and Tarne’s uncanny resemblance to leading man and actor-manager Adam Poole stir up a witch’s broth of resentments and suspicions.
     The inevitable murder appears to repeat an earlier one the same premises. Alleyn solved that one and of course solves this one, too. But the investigation, though competently handled, isn’t the focus of the story. This is really a novel about the theatre, and actors, and the ambiance of rehearsal and performance. Worth reading for that alone. For me, it was a reread, and I enjoyed it more than the first read. Recommended. ***

 

Ngaio Marsh. Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) An eccentric and self-centred lord with an overweening notion of his musical talents, his almost equally eccentric family, a band-leader trying to preserve his status as first among equals, a vainglorious but talented accordionist, an unsuitable attachment, drugs, and the desire to maintain family status make for a well-stirred pot of resentments and anxieties. Murder is inevitable. Alleyn and Troy happen to be present when it happens, enjoying a night out. The puzzle is solved fairly, with plausibly distracting facts that have to be cleared away. Marsh has a lot of fun satirising human foibles and vanities. An enjoyable re-read for me. **½

The Empire Builders (Stead): data towards insight into ancestral foibles

R. J. C. Stead. The Empire Builders (1908) Stead’s verses remind me of Kipling in their jingoism and Service in their rhymes and rhythm. They range from sentimentally heroic tales of pioneering homesteaders to abstract paeans on Man, Mother, Empire etc. Stead liked adjectives and Latinate diction, which I suppose he believed made his commonplace prejudices sound not only poetic but thoughtful and weighty. They must have seemed so to his readers in 1908, when he published this book, and which reached its fourth edition (this copy) by 1910.
     An online search reveals many editions in many different formats and price levels. Stead’s verses appealed to a large audience. They don’t appeal to me, except as awful examples of empire-worship in the Edwardian era. And of the wrong-headed belief that anything that rhymes must be poetry.
     A curiosity, data towards a better insight into the foibles of our ancestors, and thereby also a warning that much of what we consider to be proper sentiments will certainly appear wrongheaded to our descendants. *

Footnote: Stead wrote jingoistic novels as well. He worked for the CPR's immigration department, producing "reams of rose-hued prose extolling the clean, healthy vigour of life in the open spaces—spaces opened courtesy of the CPR and available at good prices. On his own time, he writes in the same vein...". The posters were also "rose-hued".  

Grand Old Man of the Theatre painted and murdered (Final Curtain, 1947)

Ngaio Marsh. Final Curtain (1947) Waiting for Roderick to return, Troy is persuaded to paint the portrait of Sir Henry Ancred, Grand Old Man of the Theatre. He’s infatuated with a chorus girl, which the Family of course does not like at all. Troy enjoys painting the old man. But several practical jokes, ascribed to Panty, Sir Henry’s youngest grandchild and favourite person, roil the household, and eventually there’s murder.

    Alleyn has just returned from duty in New Zealand, but he must investigate the crime. Troy being one of his witnesses, complicates their reunion. Marsh plays fair enough with the clues and rosy piscids, but the main interest is the Family. They’re a wonderfully awful collection of eccentrics, all but one carrying the theatrical genes that made Sir Henry an expert ham who could carry any role at whatever pitch of realism or fantasy the director wanted. Or so I infer. The solution involves distorted affection and money, as it often does in Marsh’s tales. Merely average for her, which means it’s very good. ***

 

Addams Family and Others (Night Crawlers, 1975)

Charles Addams. Nightcrawlers (1957) A re-read. I enjoy Addams’s cartoons. They work so well because they show the logical consequences of whatever assumption has created the scene he depicts. Such as a pedestrian noticing a broom leaning against a parking meter. Or four oars protruding from four holes in the hull of a yacht. Or one witch to another, We’re out of dwarf’s hair, dearie. Can we substitute? Or the scenes on the book’s covers. ****

 

Nazi Misrule (Grunberger: The 12-Year Reich)

Richard Grunberger The 12-Year Reich (1971) A carefully assembled and somewhat selective description of daily life under Nazi rule. With every fact property documented, there’s not enough data about ordinary people’s actual feelings. Still, it’s a good overview of how ideological fantasies distort government and everything it touches. The overall impression is how the growth of totalitarian Gleichschaltung (alignment) suppressed common sense and humane values in small increments until the frog was boiled. And of how the near universal desire for a quiet and orderly life can lead people into a ceding control to the tyrants.
    About the only cavil I have is Grunberger’s obvious reluctance to admit the good things that sometimes resulted from bad motives. For example, the concerts arranged for factory workers were prompted by a belief in the superiority of Aryan art, and had the aim of lifting the lower classes to the Aryan heights. The audience comments quoted show that the listeners liked the music and ignored the motivation for presenting it. But Grunberger is I think clearly correct when he suggests that the Germans’ pride in their culture was intricately mixed with a sense of its superiority, which made it easy for the Nazis to spread their cult.
     Recommended. ***