Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale works as a philosophical contemplation of hard-to-grasp ephemeral things as: time, winter, the growth of cities, love, death, progress, language, machines. It is also a story about New York, at the turn of two centuries (and the turn of one millennium). It is about the anxiety and upheaval of time, and how a culture may react, spontaneously, and as one, to such invisible mainly unfelt markers in a universal clock. And on the ground level, Winter's Tale gives us ranks of unforgettable characters, people I will never forget: Peter Lake, the orphan boy grown up to be a burglar in Belle Epoque-era New York City. Pearly Soames, the sociopathic leader of the Short Tails Gang, who steals things only because he is obsessed with colors: gold, peacock, gilded feathers, he is dazzled by them all. Beverly Penn, the consumptive teenage daughter of a newspaper mogul, who falls in love with Peter Lake, after catching him trying to rob their mansion. Mrs. Gamely, a homespun woman, a good cook, who also has an impenetrably complex vocabulary, who lives in a cottage in a mysterious frozen town called Lake of the Coheeries, north of New York City. The white horse, Athansor, whose episode of escaping from his stable in Brooklyn opens the book. Athansor is the key to it all. His connection is with Peter Lake, and through that connection, all are connected - no matter what era. There are evil political bosses, and cranky op-ed columnists and managing editors of the two rival papers in New York City, there is a mayoral race which ends up being definitive in terms of the future of the bright city, and meanwhile, the winters are apocalyptic, shutting everything down. Everyone wonders if it has to do with the mysterious whirling white cloud wall that surrounds the city. Nobody knows what the cloud wall is. It sometimes picks up the sun, glinting with gold, and the wall reaches up into the atmosphere. Sometimes it sweeps over New York City, and when that happens, chaos breaks loose. But for the most part, the white cloud wall surrounds the city, a barricade, and people often forget its existence. In the 20th century section of the book, people have become so accustomed to the cloud wall, that they don't "believe" in it anymore. Nobody even sees it. But maybe the cloud wall is a clue? To why the winters are so bad? To why the city is in turmoil?

Helprin writes in sometimes a lush prose about New York City, making it seem like a Never-Never-Land of beauty and possibility. His writing reminds me so much of Walt Whitman's, with its sweeping observations about things like crowds, and sunrise, and bridges. Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" has to be an enormous influence on Helprin, with not only its everyday images of commuters on the ferry, staring at the city, but also its vision of time and the future, Walt Whitman squinting into the space-time continuum for those who will follow him.

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you - I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Starting this book was a daunting experience. First of all, it is almost 800 pages long. Second of all, it comes so highly recommended by my friends Ted and Mitchell (and everyone who has read it also says stuff like, "It's one of my favorite books of all time") that it's intimidating to leap in. Thirdly, I have owned it for YEARS, so it's one of those "perpetually unread" books on my shelves that end up kind of haunting me, looking at me like, "So. You ever gonna deal with me or what?" And fourthly: I haven't read a novel since 2008. Fiction has been really challenging for me. Reading itself has been challenging for me, since my nervous breakdown last year. But fiction has seemed self-indulgent (for the first time in my life). It held no appeal. Well, thankfully, that is all over now. I'm back. Sheila's back!!

My taste in literature has always been towards the books that challenge. I've written about "beach reads" before, and how it is assumed that people want to read "easy" books on the beach, and while that may be true for the general population (it must be!), it is not true for me (and for many other people I know). When I have time (as I did in January on the Island), I gravitate towards the big, the difficult. Only the difficult truly engages me in a type of forgetfulness and fantasy that I look for in fiction. Winter's Tale is not challenging in the same way that, oh, Ulysses is, but it is challenging in the way that War and Peace is. It's big. It's comprehensive. It's deeply thoughtful. You cannot skim it. It demands things OF you. YOU must succumb to IT. There are probably a hundred main characters, and you leap around, from one to the other, and slowly, as each page turns, you start to feel the tapestry of the book, the interconnections, and it's one of the most exhilirating reads I have had in a long time, for that reason. It's rare that a book gives me actual goosebumps. This one did. It's similar to the last page of The Shipping News, which slayed me and left me in a puddle on the ground the first time I read it. I resisted even reading it, because I didn't want the book to end, and it's one of those moments in literature which is rare nowadays, when the style is much more ironic, with writers resisting the grand gesture. The scope of the book expanded, the scope of its emotional impact, Proulx did not let me off the hook, she forced me to go there. She forced me to realize what it was I had REALLY been reading, in that quirky weird story of Newfoundland and wind and misfits and miscreants. She forced me to see the theme. She was brave enough to state her theme, and to do so in the last page of the book? Balls. True balls.

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcabs on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes' house. A wedding present from the bride's father.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

That's an ending that you need to earn. Annie Proulx does.

Helprin does as well.

In the beginning chapters in the book, he tosses all of the balls into the air. It takes almost 800 pages for all of them to land. What ends up happening, as a reader, is that you get sucked in, here, there, you get captivated by the scenes you are presented with, and from time to time, you remember: "Oh yes. This is in reference to the gold carriers from chapter 3." "Oh yes. This is about the horse again." "Oh yes. Now we go back to the Penn family." Helprin doesn't miss a beat. There is no episode that drags, no character that jars. I was thinking a bit of Don Delillo's failed masterpiece Underworld, and how he must have been thinking (on some subconscious level perhaps) of Winter's Tale, and that that was the kind of story he wanted to tell. Multiple characters and times, huge span, and, underlying it, a deeply thought-out rumination on America, New York, and the time in which we live. There are times when Delillo is deeply successful, but overall the book did not work for me. The opening sequence, the baseball game, is as good as it gets, in terms of writing, and the book never quite lives up to that opening, which was a disappointment to me (I love Don Delillo). I believe he was going for the same effect as Helprin, and Delillo is an incredible writer, which just goes to show you how difficult the task Helprin set before him, and how 100% successful he is on every count. It is not self-indulgent, it does not overly complicate things, it does not go off on tangents: each episode dovetails back into the whole, and although the whirling white cloud wall may not be mentioned for pages at a time, you always feel its smothering presence. You never stop wondering about it. What is it?? And what might be out there, in the world, that is working on me, without me even realizing it? Don't we all have a whirling cloud wall, to some degree? Helprin makes the bold move of having it be an actual physical phemonenon, not some collective unconscious fantasy, but the real deal. There IS a cloud wall around Manhattan. There always has been. Sometimes it recedes, sometimes it surges forth (usually around the turn of centuries and millennia, apparently), but it is always there. Why?

What are we, as a culture, not paying attention to?

Winter's Tale examines those questions. To Mark Helprin, the universe is a place of wonder and pain, where things make sense. Not in a neat tied-up kind of way, but in Vaclav Havel's sense of it, when he said:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It is a redemptive view, but difficult. Everything happens for a reason, or so the idiots say, but what is the reason? Could it be bigger than anything we had ever imagined? Helprin believes that nothing goes away. In a classical sense, his is a conservative viewpoint (strip the current-day meaning of that word, if possible, although that means basically going back to Edmund Burke to get what I mean when I say that word). Things may be destroyed, and that is a shame, but nothing goes away. The fact that two forgotten people at the end of the 19th century met and fell in love is not nothing, even if nobody remembers them at the end of the 20th century. Such an emotion, such an experience, is like matter, which cannot be destroyed. It affects us today. Love cannot be destroyed. It exists, in between the molecules, in the atmosphere, adding to the collective experience of the human race. THIS is what Mark Helprin is about. In the same way that certain landscapes hold the memory of what happened there, wars, battles, fires, even if there is no record of the cataclysm, the human race holds the memory of all who have managed to love, connect, grow, live well, transcend, even in the midst of the worst horrors. It is not nothing. In Mark Helprin's world, these things, events, past history, don't just live in a metaphorical way, as in "she will live on forever in our hearts" - no, it is much more literal than that. They ACTUALLY live.

He takes as his canvas New York City, and one of the greatest gifts of the book is that it has made me see where I live in a new way. Now I am one of those people who loves history, and is always looking for evidence of the city that once was here, and now is no longer. I even remember some of it, because the changes have been so drastic in the last 20 years. I love the ghost-signs on the sides of old buildings, the old-fashioned signage which is quickly disappearing from the landscape, the beauty of the buildings built a century ago, and how our gleaming skyscrapers may be awe-inspiring, but they can't hold a candle to those old buildings, in their ornate glamour and poetry. There is a world running alongside the current world, even in New York where things are torn down and built up repeatedly, where you can get glimpses, where it is not just as though you are looking through a glass at another era, but where the other era seems to swim up from the depths towards you, and stands side by side with the modern world. Sorta like Kate & Leopold, if you will. Winter's Tale takes place in a space where such things are possible.

Like I mentioned, Helprin's vision of the world (at least in this book) is, ultimately, redemptive, but not without a price. The book was written in 1983, so the "1999" section was about the, at that time, near-future. It's not a futuristic book, it doesn't read that way, and much of the world in 1999 resembles the world in 1899, although the "towers" are mentioned (not by name). There are a couple of interesting moments when you realize, wow, 1983 ... For example: in one of the sections about the major newspaper rivalry going on in Manhattan, one of the papers is described as having offices in all of these major countries, including "The Soviet Union". Who could have predicted that a mere six years after Winter's Tale was written there would be no "Soviet Union" anymore? Additionally, the 1999 in Winter's Tale is curiously devoid of computers, although one is mentioned, except that it is more of a giant government-owned information database, and you have to drive to Connecticut to access it, and it costs millions of dollars to operate it. None of this anachronizes the book, however, because it all does seem to take place in a sort of time-out-of-time, or, more accurately, a river of time, where you dip into one era, dip into another, and it's not so important to recognize your own time, or what Helprin "got right" or "didn't", because that's not where the power of the book lies.

One of the best parts of Winter's Tale is that it gave me "scenes" unlike anything I have ever seen in any book, in life, in theatre, movies. So specific, so fantastical, that they could only have come from the expansive imagination of one man. Here are some of the things I have never seen before, but now I have, thanks to the magic of Mark Helprin's pen:

-- a white whirling cloud wall around Manhattan, with waves breaking against it
-- Peter Lake sleeping in a little compartment above the Grand Central Station green ceiling of stars
-- Meeting of thieves in the underground water tunnels of New York City
-- A white stallion galloping through a vaudeville burlesque theatre
-- Handmade human-catapult contraption made to vault two people over a raging river in Yellowstone
-- Train frozen in the snow
-- Drift of snow spanning the Hudson River, 1000 feet high. People have to climb up and over the drift, like an ice-climber on Everest, just to get through. On the top of the wall, New York can be seen in the distance
-- The Hudson River frozen over completely, with thousands, hundreds of thousands, of tents pitched across the ice
-- The Short Tails Gang, terrifying, murderous, all on ice skates, chasing Peter Lake, down the frozen Hudson River
-- Legions of consumptive people, all sleeping on their rooftops, trying to freeze the disease out of their lungs

These are just a few examples. Each section of the book had some indelible image to implant in my brain forevermore. I will never forget the "Lake of the Coheeries", the frozen (in terms of it being winter, and in terms of it being frozen in time) town north of New York. I will never forget the raucous "oyster bar", populated by thieves and prostitutes, in an underground cavern somewhere beneath the streets of Manhattan. I will never forget the image of the "machine display" in Madison Square Garden, the pistons and gears and mechanical motions that catapulted Peter Lake into the knowledge that he was a mechanic. I will never forget the stone bathtub at the Penn mansion where Peter Lake and Beverly would embrace and swim, before the fever overtook her and she was done for the night. I am forever grateful to Mark Helprin for showing me these things from his beautiful dreamspace, because now they are mine. Forever.

They are not nothing. Nothing goes away. Even things of the mind, the imagination, the dream, are important information to have as we try to navigate our way through the world.

There is more to say. The prophetic nature of the book, in terms of September 11th, has not really been addressed, and I don't remember it being mentioned in the wake of that awful day, at least not in the same way that E.B. White's essay was, repeatedly, with its dread-making phrases of vision and prophesy:

The city, for the first time, in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island of fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

E.B. White wrote those chilling words in 1948.

In the wake of September 11th, I heard them quoted again and again. He was right. He was right. Mark Helprin was right, too, in more ways than one (he got the destruction wrong by one year - he put it in 2000, not 2001), but I didn't see his book bandied about in the same way as E.B. White's essay. For whatever reason, his deeply beautiful and haunting poem to New York City escaped resurrrection.

But it remains indestructible.

As the city does. Which appears to me to be one of Helprin's messages. Burn it down, go ahead. You will not destroy what is here. You can destroy the buildings but ultimately New York, like all cities, is an idea before it is a place, and ideas, like matter, cannot be destroyed. As a New Yorker, as someone who loves this place, his book brought me to tears of love, which is a very strange thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is not every day that a writer comes along who reminds you to love your home. To look around and value not just what it is, but what it has been, what it started out as, and what it will always be.

Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for some, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.

A masterpiece of the 20th century.

Tumblr?

I like the layout, and like the fragmentary nature of it, although I am not sure if I'm doing it right. Blog will still go on naturally, but I do like having a little bin to put quotes and pics, it creates a nice collage.

Today in history: February 7, 1867

It's the birthday of a beloved American author - Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was born on February 7, 1867.

Her books are so much a part of my childhood that they don't even feel like books to me. I was 7, 8, 9 when I read them, and I can barely say I read them. I LIVED them. And the fact that at the same time that I was LIVING these books - a wonderful television series based on these books came on helped me immerse myself in that bygone age even further. Despite its bizarre and explosive ending, the series captured some of the simplicity and beauty in those books. Laura, Mary, Nellie Olson - all of these people were just woven into my childhood. We used them as reference points as kids. Whispering to each other about a classmate: "She's such a Nellie Olson". Even now, that particular description would work for me, in terms of telling me everything I needed to know about a person.

Here's a wonderful image of the kind of pioneer cabin that the Ingalls family probably lived in:

Not only do her books work as great stories in and of themselves, but they portray the pioneer experience in such an immediate and first-hand way that it came to life for future generations. There I was, frolicking in the dirt of my backyard in Rhode Island, but because I had read those books I knew about the great plains, and covered wagons, and how medicine was ... er ... different back then ... and what it was like to have NO money so that one Christmas they each got a cookie, and a shiny penny and a peppermint candy for presents. And the girls were THRILLED about these presents, which seemed insane to me, but the way the book was written I went into THEIR world, rather than expecting them to reflect mine. Laura Ingalls Wilder described that one blizzardy Christmas so well, and the beauty of those simple hand-made gifts - that I, as a child, really learned something about the world. I remember thinking, (I must have been 8 years old): "They only got a candy-cane and a cookie? And a PENNY??? But ... how could they have been happy with that????" But the WAY she wrote it made it clear that the entire thing was magical and exciting ... as the snow pounded against the log cabin windows. And so then I realized: "Wait. This is Christmas. This is their Christmas. They were happy. They were happy." And I learned a wee lesson about ... oh ... materialism, and gratitude, and stuff like that. I learned that my world was not the only world. That my time was not the only time. Worlds of imagination opened up in my head.

Their lives were SO different from mine - and yet human beings themselves don't change, and I found so much to relate to in those books. Getting into trouble, learning tough lessons about life, dealing with snotty school girls, the excitement of setting out on a journey with your family ... these were all things I fully recognized from my own life.

Laura Ingalls Wilder was encouraged by her daughter (who was also a writer) to write down stories of her childhood. To get a glimpse of just how intense that relationship was, check out this fascinating New Yorker article about Rose Wilder. Quite a family psychodrama there, and it seems far far removed from the fresh windy air and wide open spaces that make up the landscape and world of the Little House books. By the time, Laura Ingalls Wilder started publishing, the entire world she described had pretty much disappeared. In one person's lifetime. Her first book Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1930. Lindbergh had flown across the ocean. There were railroads criss-crossing the country. Autmobiles. Telephones. Laura Ingalls Wilder straddled an enormous generational divide. Her books are the bridge.

My favorite of the books were By the Shores of Silver Lake and also The Long Winter. I believe The Long Winter is her best book.

I'll close with an excerpt from Little House in the Big Woods that brings a lump to my throat, and kind of captures the simple home-spun magic in these books:

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods.

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Happy birthday to an American treasure. And thank you for making me see, as a young child, that things like log cabins and Pa and Ma and firelight "could not be forgotten" ... thank you for making that "long time ago" come to life for me, a young East Coast girl at the tail-end of the 20th century.

Movie Marathon

While I had tons of time to read, and walk, and have visitors, and write, and dream, I also had an orgy of movie-watching out on the Island. I brought some movies with me, but for the most part, I kept my TV on TCM the entire time and went wild, seeing whatever was on.

Some I took notes on, others I didn't. Here is the list of total movies seen in the month of January, with notes when applicable. Oh, and my "mirror" notes are part of that damn post I've been percolating over for literally years: men looking at themselves in the mirror in film. Basically, my theory is now bust (that men looking at themselves in the mirror in every other movie began in the 70s mostly)- I love that my original theory is now bust - it puts the post (in my head) in a whole new and exciting direction. And it actually ends up proving my original point.

Darjeeling Limited

Period of Adjustment

Two Weeks in Another Town

All Fall Down

Young Lovers

The Informer - NY Film Critics Best Picture of the Year, 1935
-- shot in one month
-- "nauseating, beastly" - Catholic Legion of Decency (focused on the scenes in the brothel) - "an insult to Celtic women"

Play Girl
-- effed-up pre-Code

Life Begins
-- maternity ward
"What's it for?"
"I'm not supposed to tell you but the doctor wouldn't order it if you didn't need it"

Heroes For Sale - Richard Barthelmess
-- great!

She Had to Say Yes

Key to the City
-- Clark Gable, Loretta Young

The Scarlet Empress
-- awesome

Finishing School

Registered Nurse

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison

Fear Strikes Out
-- Red Sox!! Jimmy Pearsall
-- great, moving, ahead of its time, portrayal of mental illness
-- Karl Malden, Anthony Perkins

Tender Mercies

Two Girls and a Sailor

The Great Debaters

The Double Life of Veronique

A Place in the Sun

Play Girl
-- Kay Francis

Searching for Bobby Fischer

The Feminine Touch
-- Drunk man on phone to operator: "Hello? Yes, I'd like Sydney Australia ... No one in particular, just Sydney, Australia."

Comrade X
-- Love!!
-- "co-pilot, co-co pilot and co-co-co pilot." "Stop stuttering."
-- "Comrade, I am obeying you blindly."

Night Must Fall
-- Mirror moment!!

Rage in Heaven
-- Robert Montgomery, George Sanders, Ingrid Bergman
-- great

A Woman's Face
-- fave of mine

Cast a Dark Shadow
-- Dirk Bogarde

Sounder

The Band Wagon

The Fountainhead

The Subject Was Roses

In a Lonely Place

Funny People

Rain
-- Joan Crawford
-- holy crap

The Whole Town's Talking
-- Edward G. Robinson
-- Mirror moment!!

The Long Night
-- Mirror!!

5th Avenue Girl
-- adore this movie

The Wedding Night
-- sad. Touching

Philadelphia Story
-- CK Dexter Haven is a deceptively simple part. It's actually quite difficult to get it right - without coming off as awful or condescending. Grant nails it.

Johnny Guitar
-- brill

The Adventures of Mark Twain

Love, Lombard-style

And Sheila-style as well.

Found this poster in a bin on Bleecker Street and promptly purchased it. It now hangs in my room, a glorious reminder of the upheaval of love (before breakfast and otherwise). I am in love with it.

I've only had a black eye once. It happened the first time I ventured into a mosh pit. Boom. Clocked right in the eye. Not quite the same thing.

UPDATE: Tim Lucas made a really great comment about this poster on my FB page: He said it reminded him of a Gibson Girl, the period look of the poster - only she is a "Gibson Girl, defiled and defiant." Nice!!

Block Island collage 2

More scattered images of my time on the island. I haven't quite acclimated yet, but last night was very windy (we were supposed to get a blizzard - no sign of it yet) and the sound of the wind was very comforting, made me think of the island.

Today in history: February 6, 1564

Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty's secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born on this day.

(this 1585 portrait is widely thought to be of Marlowe)

I love Christopher Marlowe. He died so young. It was a turbulent time, for England certainly, but for the theatrical world, in particular. Marlowe was accused of putting atheistic ideas into his plays, and was on the verge of being arrested, when he was killed. There was also the little matter of Shakespeare to deal with. Those two were contemporaries. How did they inform and perhaps copy one another? Evidence shows that it was Shakespeare who did most of the copying, which is no surprise, since his plots and stories were always taken from other sources, with one or two notable exceptions. Scholars have studied this literary symbiosis for years, and it's all juicy awesome stuff. The answer seems less interesting than the inquiry itself. Shakespeare is rather dim, in terms of what we know about his life. There's very little evidence left behind. (Besides the plays, I mean.) But Marlowe emerges with more clarity - there's just more that is known about his actual life. The revelation that he was, indeed, a spy, adds definite luster to an already fascinating young man. And then that he would die, in a sword-scuffle over who was going to pick up the check ... there's a lot here to keep conspiracy theorists happy for centuries. It certainly drives the scholarship forward.

But his plays! His language! His influence is so vast as to be nearly invisible now. There are times when people quote Marlowe without realizing that it is he whom they are quoting. For example:

This is from Doctor Faustus - a famous excerpt:.

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
And all is dross that is not Helena:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea I will wound Achillis in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

SOME QUOTES ON MARLOWE:

"No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers." -- Thomas Nashe, a friend of Marlowe's

"His father lacked cash, always a grave trouble for the family. The chief cause of this lay not in John's imprudence, but in the fact that payments to shoemakers were often made by either bond or book, which meant that a cobbler often waited for cash while his tanning needs made matters worse. Still, if cash and credit's mysteries intrigued Christopher, his father's shop did not. In a juvenile play - which may be his apprentice work if it dates from about 1580 - the script refers, somewhat condescendingly, to Kent and cobblers. Certainly, throughout his writing career, Marlowe avoided his father's trade, and in this he was unlike the poet of Stratford. Whereas Shakespeare, as the son of a Midlands glover and processor of leather, readily alludes to a glover's implements or to animal skins, Marlowe, in his known work, never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, sew, or sole (as for a shoe), but distances himself from his father's concerns. At various times, when he refers to leather, or boots, or even when he uses the word sell, the allusions are oddly repulsive:

Covetousness: begotten of an old Churl in a leather bag (Doctor Faustus (1616)

wormeaten leathern targets (His version of Lucan's Pharsalia)

As if he had meant to clean my Boots with his lips (The Jew of Malta)

our boots which lie foul upon our hands (Doctor Faustus, (1604)

You will not sell it [a sacred crown], would you? (Tamburlaine, Part One)

"Such lines may suggest hatred not of the cobbler but of his work, and we can be sure that he never envied John Marlowe's slavery." -- Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy

"The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare. " -- Algernon Charles Swinburne

"Christopher Marlowe's life was short, sharp and irresistible. His fame rests not only on six violently glittering plays written in his 20s but also on the tantalizing story that may be considered his masterpiece, for Marlowe inhabited his time like a player strutting upon an invisible stage. His life was his most remarkable piece of theater. Everyone imitated Marlowe. His first play, Tamburlaine, was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography, The World of Christopher Marlowe, within the next couple of years three new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe's original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence of Marlowe's style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of Marlowe's semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned to imitating his predecessor in As You Like It. Marlowe's contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear." -- Daniel Swift in "The Nation"

"In common with the greatest - Marlowe, Webster, Tourner, and Shakespeare - they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formular remains to be defined." -- T.S. Eliot on the Elizabethan-Jacobean poets

"What an example for our distracted poetry, which so often now strikes at the absolute and achieves the commonplace! These poets [George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe] lived life from the ground upwards." -- Edgell Rickword, 1924

"The unity of tone and purpose in Doctor Faustus is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labour as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose History of Dr Faustus, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this tragic poem - it has hardly the structure of a play - for the qualities of terror and splendour, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer straightforwardness of speech in which his agonizing horror finds vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy." -- Algernon Charles Swinburne

"His narrator [in Hero and Leander] is abrupt, devil-may-care, often unreliable, but brilliant enough to be worth listening to, even though he might be asking us to buy him another drink. One thinks of Chaucer's Canterbury-bound raconteurs, but a much closer parallel exists in works such as T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', or again in monologues by Frost, Lowell, or Tony Harrison. In other words, Marlowe foreshadows the method of the dramatic and psychological monologue. What the narrator says is slanted, but one is encouraged to see through the aberrant report to the real state of psyches, and beyond that to symbols of the human condition. The poem takes a giant step ahead in form, and the form itself partly arises from Marlowe's need to conceal his feelings; he never permits himself, here or elsewhere, a direct viewpoint of his own. He uses hyperbolic images to distance sexual love, but then explores what might be his, or anyone's initial experience of it. If the action is cruel, its shame and pain are offset by fumbling tenderness. Nor can we blame the tale-teller for being perverse of inconsistent. Typically, the narrator digresses in an anecdote about Mercury, loses the story's thread or its relation to the love-story, and so becomes irrelevant, only to enthral in all that he says. His voice has so strong a movement that nothing impedes it, and the poem's beauty begins to look inevitable, though no more consciously planned than nature's forms may be. Nothing is overtly patterned in Hero except for the stepping stones of its couplet rhymes. One result is that it becomes a laboratory of the imagination, even a discourse about writing, and a work so free of correctness that it exhibits at every turn the primacy of creativity itself. Marlowe's major poem has been admired for centuries, though never more avidly than by the Victorians. It's 'riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form,' wrote George Saintsbury, 'has never been approached by any writer'. For Havelock Ellis, the poem was 'the brightest flower of the English Renaissance,' and Swinburne, with Hero and Leander doubtless in mind, called its poet 'alone the true Apollo of our dawn.' Such praise had been foreshadowed in lines which Sir Francis Verney sent to Robert Cecil, then earl of Salisbury, only a few years after Hero was published. Verney hails Marlowe as 'the splendour of our worthless time', as if no other Renaissance poet could touch him." -- Park Honan - on Marlowe's poem "Hero and Leander" in Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy

"He took his BA in 1584, his MA three years later, by which time he had probably completed Tamburlaine. He was the first of the university wits to employ blank verse. It's generally thought that most if not all of his small surviving body of nondramatic verse - Hero and Leander, 'The Passionate Shepherd', and the Ovid and Lucan translations - were written in his university years, the fruit of youth and relative leisure. The six years that elapsed between his taking his MA and his shadowy death - possibly as a result of drink, or low political intrigue, or a romantic entanglement with a rough character 'fitter to be a pimp, than an ingenious amoretto', or perhaps a tussle over the bill ('le recknynge') - at the hand of Ingram Frisar in a Deptford tavern on 30 May 1593 were busy ones. He wrote plays, was attacked for atheism, was associated (if it existed) with Raleigh's 'School of Night,' and lodged with Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy), who later brought charges of blasphemy against him. These he had to answer before the Privy Council in 1593, the very council that secretly employed him to spy on English Catholics on the Continent. He achieved much in a short life." -- Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets

"If one takes The Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or as a 'tragedy of blood,' but as a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful and mature tone." -- T.S. Eliot

"He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and his invention were foreborn; what they thought, they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed." -- Thomas Nashe

"In Marlowe's superb verse there is very little to indicate that the writer had ever encountered any human beings." -- James Branch Cabell

"Marlowe painted gigantic ambitions, desires for impossible things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very powers which had raised them to their thrones. Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabbas are the personifications of arrogance, ambition and greed. There is sometimes a touch of the extravagant or bombastic, or even of the puerile in his plays, for he had no sense of humor; nor had he the ability to portray a woman. He wrote no drama on the subject of love. Furthermore, his world is not altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination." -- Martha Fletcher Bellinger, 1927

"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, like Goethe's Faust, finds himself before the specter of Helen (the idea that Helen of Troy was a ghost or apparition is already present in the ancients) and says to her, 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.' And then, 'O thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.' He does not say 'evening sky,' but 'evening air.' All of Copernican space is present in that word air, the infinite space that was one of the revelations of the Renaissance, the space in which we still believe, despite Einstein, that space that came to supplant the Ptolomaic system which presides over Dante's triple comedy." -- Jorge Luis Borges

"And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in the defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye." -- Coroner's inquest, 1593

I'm armed with more than complete steel,
The justice of my quarrel.
Christopher Marlowe, Lust's Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4.

"He came to London to seek his fortune . . . a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition. Who knows to what heights he might have risen but for his untimely end?" -- Swinburne

One of Marlowe's plays was Tamburlaine, the brutal story of one of the many conquerors of Central Asia (known as Timur, Tamerland, Timurlane, etc.). One of those who galloped in, sacked everything, and then, strangely, built things back up again. Coliin Thubron, in his wonderful The Lost Heart of Asia describes the conundrum of Timur (conqueror, artisan, WTF?):

Tamerlane, the Earth-Shaker, was the last, and perhaps most awesome, of these world predators. Born in 1336 fifty miles south of Samarkand, he was the son of a petty chief in a settled Mongol clan. He acquired th ename "Timur-i-Leng" or "Timur the Lame" after arrows maimed his right leg and arm, and passed as Tamerlane into the fearful imagination of the Weset. By his early thirties, after years of fighting over the splintered heritage of Genghiz Khan, he had become lord of Mavarannah, the "land Beyond the River", with his capital at Samarkand, and had turned his cold eyes to the conquest of the world.

From the accounts that are left of him, he emerges not only as the culmination of his pitiless forerunners, but as the distant ancestor of the art-loving Moghals of India. Over the terrified servants and awed ambassadors at his court, his eyes seemed to burn without brilliance, and never winced with either humour or sadness. But a passion for practical truth fed his unlettered intelligence. He planned his campaigns in scrupulous detail, and unlike Genghiz Khan he led them in person. He clothed his every move with the sanctions of the Islamic faith, but astrology and omens, shamanism and public prayers, were all invoked to serve his needs. An angel, it was rumoured, told him men's hidden thoughts. Yet he assaulted Moslems as violently as he did Christians and Hindus. Perhaps he confused himself with God.

No flicker of compassion marred his progress. His butchery surpassed that of any before him. The towers and pyramids of skulls he left behind -- ninety thousand in the ruins of Baghdad alone -- were calculated warnings. After overrunning Persia and despoiling the Caucasus, he hacked back the remnants of the Golden Horde to Moscow, then launched a precipitate attack on India, winching his horses over the snowbound ravines of the Hindu Kush, where 20,000 Mongols froze to death. On the Ganges plain before Delhi, the Indian sultan's squadrons of mailed elephants, their tusks lashed with poisoned blades, sent a momentary tremor through the Mongol ranks; but the great beasts were routed, and the city and all its inhabitants levelled with the earth. A year later the Mongols were wending back over the mountains, leading 10,000 pack-mules sagging with gold and jewels. They left behind a land which would not recover for a century, and five million Indian dead.

Now Tamerland turned his attention west again. Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus fell. In 1402, on the field of Ankara, at the summit of his pwoer, he decimated the army of the Ottoman sultan Beyazid, and inadvertently delayed the fall of Constantinople by another half century.

Between these monotonous acts of devastation, the conqueror returned to the Samarkand he cherished. At his direction a procession of captured scholars, theologians, musicans and craftsmen arrived in the capital with their books and tools and families -- so many that they were forced to inhabit caves and orchards in the suburbs. Under their hands the mud city bloomed into faience life. Architects, painters and calligraphers from Persia; Syrian silk-weavers, armourers and glass-blowers; Indian jewellers and workers in stucco and metal; gunsmiths and artillery engineers from asia Minor: all labored to raise titanic mosques and academies, arsenals, libraries, vaulted and fountained bazaars, even an observatory and a menagerie. The captured elephants lugged into place the marble of Tabriz and the Caucausus, while rival emirs -- sometimes Tamerlane himself -- drove on the work with the parvenu impatience of shepherd-princes. The whole city, it seems, was to be an act of imperial power. Villages were built around it named Cairo, Baghdad, Shiraz or Damascus (a ghostly Paris survives) in token of their insignificance. It was the "Mirror of the World," and the premier city of Asia.

Tamerlane himself confounds simple assessment. He kept a private art collection, whose exquisitely illuminated manuscripts he loved but could not read. His speech, it seems, was puritan in its decorum. He was an ingenious and addicted chess-player, who elaborated the game by doubling its pieces -- with two giraffes, two war-engines, a vizier and others -- over a board of 110 squares. A craving for knowledge plunged him into hard, questing debates with scholars and scientists, whom he took with him even on campaign, and his quick grasp and powerful memory gave him a working knowledge of history, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.

Yet at heart he was a nomad. He moved between summer and winter pastures with his whole court and horde. Even at Samarkand he usually pavilioned in the outskirts, or in one of the sixteen gardens he spread round the city: watered parks with ringing names. Each garden was different. In one stood a porcelain Chinese palace; another glowed with the saga of his reign in lifelike frescoes, all long vanished; yet another was so vast that when a workman lost his horse there it grazed unfound for six months.

Marlowe, age 22, how is that possible??, took on this historical figure as his launching-off point. Marlowe wouldn't know how to "start small" if he tried.

Excerpt from Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe.

Enter Tamburlaine, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, Zenocrate, Anippe, two Moores drawing Bajazeth in a cage, and Zabina following him.

TAMBURLAINE
Bring out my footstool.

[They take BAJAZETH out of the cage.]

BAJAZETH
Ye holy priests of heavenly Mahomet,
That, sacrificing, slice and cut your flesh,
Staining his altars with your purple blood,
Make heaven to frown, and every fixed star
To suck up poison from the moorish fens,
And pour it in this glorious tyrant's throat!

TAMBURLAINE
The chiefest god, first mover of that sphere
Enchas'd with thousands ever-shining lamps,
Will sooner burn the glorious frame of heaven
Than it should so conspire my overthrow.
But, villain, thou that wishest this to me,
Fall prostrate on the low disdainful earth,
And be the footstool of great Tamburlaine,
That I may rise into my royal throne.

BAJAZETH
First shalt thou rip my bowels with thy sword,
And sacrifice my heart to death and hell,
Before I yield to such a slavery.

TAMBURLAINE
Base villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,
Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground
That bears the honour of my royal weight;
Stoop, villain, stoop! stoop; for so he bids
That may command thee piecemeal to be torn,
Or scatter'd like the lofty cedar-trees
Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter.

BAJAZETH
Then, as I look down to the damned fiends,
Fiends, look on me! and thou, dread god of hell,
With ebon sceptre strike this hateful earth,
And make it swallow both of us at once!

[TAMBURLAINE gets up on him into his chair.]

TAMBURLAINE
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign'd at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres,
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
My sword struck fire from his coat of steel,
Even in Bithynia, when I took this Turk;
As when a fiery exhalation,
Wrapt in the bowels of a freezing cloud,
Fighting for passage, make[s] the welkin crack,
And casts a flash of lightning to the earth:
But, ere I march to wealthy Persia,
Or leave Damascus and th' Egyptian fields,
As was the fame of Clymene's brain-sick son
That almost brent the axle-tree of heaven,
So shall our swords, our lances, and our shot
Fill all the air with fiery meteors;
Then, when the sky shall wax as red as blood,
It shall be said I made it red myself,
To make me think of naught but blood and war.

Saying goodbye to the island

Watching it stream away from me on the horizon.

Block Island collage 1.

A smattering of images from my time out on that beautiful island. Part one.

Bloody Marys, Michael Jackson, rocks in the tub, and a random object from the cellar

During my second week on Block Island, the ferry brought me some visitors: Mitchell, Luisa and Meghan. Mitchell was in Rhode Island for 5 days and so they took the ferry out and spent the day with me. They arrived in the morning and left at sunset. It was one of those days that catapulted us out of normal time. Normal time didn't seem to exist. The day lasted forever. We barely ate, although we kept talking about eating. There were pastries brought from Providence (a big joke - "who's got the pastries?" "are you in charge of the pastry box?"), and I basically had a box of Triscuits. The thought that we could "grab some lunch", as though there were a sandwich shop open, was foolhardy, since NOTHING is open out there. I had stuff to make sandwiches, I had salad stuff, I even had some chicken - but we just never got around to eating. We were too busy drinking highly complicated Bloody Marys, cavorting all over the house, sitting out on the porch and talking, blasting music and dancing around, and bickering constantly. "SHEILA. SHEILA. SHEILA. SHEILA." shouted Luisa at me, to get my attention when I was talking to Mitchell. Finally I was like (on the verge of hysterics) - "Luisa ... what? That is not socially acceptable behavior ..." We all lost it. We decided to make Bloody Marys, so we stopped off at the grocery store after I picked them up at the ferry. Luisa decided to just have whiskey, so the image of Luisa, walking out of the grocery store, with a bottle of whiskey in a bag, and it wasn't even noon yet, was just awesome. Mitchell, thinking about Bloody Marys, said, "Oh, you know what would be good? Pickle spears." I replied, "Please don't get sexual with me. It makes me really uncomfortable."

Once back at my little abode, Mitchell, Meghan and I set about making Bloody Marys, which involved celery salt on plates, pickle juice, horseradish, tobasco ... it took a half an hour to make the drinks. Luisa who had poured herself a whiskey and sat down in the den called out to us, "I don't what YOU guys are doing, but I'M having my drink."

We sat around in my front room (with the rolltop desk) - a place I hadn't really spent any time in, but it was nice: my visitors warmed it up for me. There was so much laughter that I am surprised the house did not actually elevate up into the air with it. Luisa was describing her girlfriend's tub and how it "has rocks in it" - which freaked me out and I couldn't let it go. What Luisa actually meant was that it is a stone tub, with laid-out rocks beneath the surface, almost like a patio floor, but beneath the tile. But perhaps due to my Bloody Mary, I kept picturing pebbles in the tub, and I kept interrupting Luisa's story, like a halfwit. "She has ROCKS in her tub??" "Well, no, not like - it's like inlaid rocks beneath the --" "ROCKS? DO THEY HURT YOUR FEET?" Luisa kept trying, "No, it's more like it's underneath the --" I screamed at her, nervous and insecure, "Should I have rocks in my tub???" Like: is that a thing now? Is it a trend I need to be aware of?? The conversation, needless to say, had to stop, because I couldn't seem to understand what was happening, and Luisa was laughing too hard to go on.

The following morning, I woke up, getting used to the quiet and solitude once again, and I went into the upstairs bathroom to wash my face. I hadn't been in there the night before. As I walked in, something caught my eye, and I looked into the tub and there, lined up in a very scary Blair Witch kind of way, were three beach rocks. Placed there at some point during the day before by Luisa. The image of her doing this secretly, and then not telling anyone, leaving it there to be discovered by me, is so so funny to me.

Luisa loves cellars and wanted to go check out my cellar. I was afraid of the cellar. It looked like a place where you would be hacked to pieces by an intruder and never seen again. I was also afraid of the spiders. Luisa found a mop and stomped down into the cellar, whiskey in hand, to check out the cellar, and clear away cobwebs. Meanwhile, Mitchell, Meghan and I were dancing around to Michael Jackson in the kitchen. Luisa eventually returned, announcing, "Cobwebs are gone." She was holding something behind her back. "Guess what I found," she said. I stepped back, fearfully. And when she brought out what she had found ... it took us all a minute to even understand what it was that we were seeing. We were stunned.

I will not describe it, because the visual is best. The object appears in the montage below, and it will be immediately obvious what it is. The object became our mascot. We placed it everywhere, taking pictures of it, laughing so hard tears streamed down our cheeks. We placed it on the bulkhead in the backyard so that it could stare at the psychedelic sunset. We were giddy. No doubt. Giddy with laughter and happiness.

We didn't even care that we didn't eat. Their ferry home was at 5:30, and at around 4:45, exhausted from all the housebound fun we were having (I had all these plans to take them to the Southeast Lighthouse, which never came to fruition because we were having too much fun taking pictures of each other and wearing goofy sunglasses) - someone said, "Did we even eat?"

No, we did not.

But it didn't matter at all. The whole day was a feast for the soul.

Mrs. Robinson, Northern Ireland style

An absolutely fascinating account of the brou-haha surrounding Iris Robinson, wife of Peter Robinson, First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. A recent BBC documentary about the scandal has got everybody talking. The piece is by Anne Enright, recent winner of The Booker Prize for The Gathering, her brutal (sometimes unreadably so) story about a big Irish family that was so claustrophobic I had to put it down to catch a breath of air. (One of my posts on it here.) But it cannot be argued that this woman can write. There were passages in The Gathering that were as good as it gets. Her writing pierces, sears, the reader. You can't escape.

I also am in love with Anne Enright as an interview subject. She certainly gives good interview. Her thoughts on Ireland, and Irish writing, and Joyce, and John McGahern, and the whole canon of them (mostly male) is fascinating. I always prick up my ears when I see an interview with her, I know it's going to be good stuff. She's a bit wild. A bit un-pin-down-able. Very funny, too, which you would never know from the mostly humorless The Gathering.

And her account here of Iris Robinson, a 60 year old politicians' wife, who has had an affair with a 19-year-old boy, which involved a siphoning off of funds from the Castelereagh Borough Council to give to him, and now her hospitalization, her psychiatric issues (long-standing), and the whole crazy terrain of Northern Irish politics is amazing - I couldn't stop reading it. Here's a brief excerpt that certainly shows the Anne Enright tang and tartness, but you should really read the whole thing:

In a statement made before the documentary aired, Iris said that ‘severe bouts of depression’ altered her mood and personality. ‘During this period of serious mental illness, I lost control of my life and did the worst thing that I have ever done.’ Her mental state is a matter of some political significance. ‘She is presently receiving treatment from a psychiatrist,’ her husband said at a post-revelation press conference and ‘the solicitor was unable to take instruction from her because of her illness.’ He seems to imply that Iris is in some quasi-legal sense insane.

Being mad in Northern Ireland is different from being mad in any other place. The Robinsons come from a community in which people talk to God and He talks right back to them. ‘I have forgiven her,’ said Peter Robinson. ‘More important, I know that she has sought and received God’s forgiveness.’ These communications from God can be fairly abstract, they can be politically convenient, they seldom involve what the rest of the world call auditory hallucinations, but there is no doubt that the sense of conviction they carry can be overwhelming.

There is also a particular flavour to Northern Irish paranoia. A system of spies, counterspies and informers was in place in the province from the 1970s; British intelligence listened, watched, misinformed. They checked sheets for sperm or explosives with the help of the Four Square Laundry van. Annoyed at long-standing rumours that her husband beat her, Iris has said that ‘this malicious lie was started by the [British] government in an attempt to blacken Peter’s name when he was protesting at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It took root because I was in hospital 17 times during that period with gynaecological problems.’ This is a lot to unpack. It may all even be true. Slightly more strange is her claim that Peter’s steak was laced with rat poison when they ate in a restaurant on the outskirts of Belfast which had ‘a very nationalist staff’. But then, who’s to say? The loyalist community could trust neither their Catholic neighbours nor the British government to whose queen they professed such shouting, undying and possibly unwanted loyalty.

It is interesting in this context to look at the DUP’s obsession with sodomy, not the activity perhaps so much as the word; one that is to be said out loud, without fear; one that should be repeated, shouted, written down for all to see. Paisley was always a great man for naming and shaming. ‘I denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a given; what they had to guard against were the sins of men. In 1977 Paisley added to the gaiety of several nations when he was shown on the news walking around with a placard that said ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’. His campaign was a response to the liberalising laws of Westminster, which were threatening to leave this entrenched culture behind. Sodomy, in 1977, symbolised everything. Betrayal. Isolation. The future.

Iris Robinson may not have been in full health when she made her peculiar statements about homosexuality, but if they are evidence that she was unwell, then so are the other members of her party. The radio interview which lost her the sympathy, not just of the wider world, but also, crucially, of Selwyn Black, happened on 6 June 2008. By midsummer, she and Kirk McCambley were lovers. Whatever was happening to her in those weeks, it wasn’t that grey old beast, depression. Indeed, looking at the way she led her life, you might conclude that Iris was more often up than down.

Read the whole thing.