Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) is often hailed as Russia’s greatest composer (from a strong field), and his works epitomise the emotional depth for which Russian music is known. You might say he was something of a Russian Beethoven, with the same genius for dramatic intensity and emotional range, and indeed Tchaikovsky deeply respected and acknowledged Beethoven. Although his true love was in fact Mozart, it is Beethoven’s influence that is evident in his compositions, particularly his later symphonies such as his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, with its exploration of melancholia. Today, however, I’m highlighting his remarkable Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor, Op. 23.
It’s one of those tunes from the world of classical music which you instantly recognise when you hear it even if you don’t necessarily know it from its title. It was composed during the several months leading up to February 1875 and first performed in October of that year, in Boston, by pianist Hans von Bülow. It was to become one of the best known piano concerti of all time and in a nutshell it is a sublime piece of music. Strange then, that it should have been so roundly slated by the man who Tchaikovsky had originally wanted to play it before approaching von Bülow, namely Nikolai Rubinstein.
As the story is related, Tchaikovsky invited Rubinstein to the Moscow Conservatory to demo his composition, just three days after completing it. Full of anticipation and hope that Rubinstein would be blown away and agree to play it, Tchaikovsky sat at the piano and played the first movement. To Tchaikovsky’s chagrin not a single word was spoken and after a period of silence he could stand it no more: “Well?” he said, to which Rubinstein’s tactless and rather brutal response is described in Tchaikovsky’s own words:
“It turned out that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten.” Rubinstein went on to say “that if I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honour of playing my thing at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I answered, ‘I shall publish the work exactly as it is!’”.
You can only imagine the indignation Tchaikovsky must have felt at that cutting critique. And that’s why Tchaikovsky approached von Bülow to play it…
Postscript: Rubinstein changed his opinion of the piece and became a big fan (you know what it’s like, you sometimes need to hear an album three or four times before properly appreciating it), and finally even played it, with gusto, in Moscow, St Petersburg and Paris, in 1878.
Let’s hear the opening four minutes as played by the seventeen-year-old prodigy Evgeny Kissin, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Salzburg 1988.
Kate Bush is nothing if not innovative. She burst onto the scene in 1978, aged nineteen, with her debut single Wuthering Heights. Whilst the rest of the charts were populated either by the new generation of punk and new wave or the old generation of disco and soft rock, here was Kate singing theatrically about a Victorian novel and dancing ethereally on Top of the Pops. The nation was strangely hooked and it went to number one (and no doubt Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights experienced a boost in sales at the same time).
Kate had been writing songs for years, having grown up in a music-loving household in Kent, and had recorded a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who immediately recognised the song-writing talent and other-worldly vocals. He encouraged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was sixteen and still at school so she continued her studies, honed her craft, learned interpretive dance under choreographer Lindsay Kemp, and in the interests of good research read Wuthering Heights (she had written the song before actually reading the book, having caught the back end of a BBC TV adaptation of it). And the rest, as they say, is history — she went on to record nine studio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recently enjoyed something of a renaissance following the use of her song Running up that Hill in the Netflix blockbuster series Stranger Things.
Cloudbusting remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buying public thought that the subject matter of Wuthering Heights was somewhat quirky, it hadn’t seen nothing yet. The song took inspiration from the 1973 memoirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), written about his close relationship with his father the psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wilhelm Reich had been experimenting with a cosmic energy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accumulators which he claimed could cure cancers and promote health. Later he would build a rain-making machine called a cloudbuster and father and son would spend hours on their farm pointing it at the sky and trying to make rain. Like all promoters of fringe ideas (ask Nikola Tesla), Reich eventually fell foul of the authorities, was imprisoned, and had his inventions and ideas suppressed.
Kate’s musical interpretation of the story is outstanding. It is at once mesmeric with its mantra-like backing vocals and hypnotic cello strokes, and a masterclass in story-telling with its setting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intriguing feel to it, long before I discovered its true back story. The video accompanying the single, is genius: a masterstroke casting of Donald Sutherland as the father, and Kate herself with a pixie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloudbuster” itself, designed by the same people who designed the “xenomorph” for Ridley Scott’s Alien, is a wonderful steam-punk invention. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter taking over the reins and achieving success with his father’s inventions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was gratified that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it captured the situation and the emotion perfectly. Watch and enjoy here…
Oscar Wilde is remembered these days for being 1) witty (“I have nothing to declare but my genius”) and 2) gay, in a far-from-ideal period of history in which to be gay (Bosie, Reading gaol and all that). I suppose all writers can be boiled down to a simple phrase (Orwell: edgy political allegory and warning to future generations; Tolkien: medievalist purveyor of elf-lore, etc). However, whilst describing Wilde in a sentence or two is all well and good, it’s good to know that his actual work continues to be consumed on stage and screen — all four of his so-called drawing-room plays have been made into films (not to mention operas and musicals) and all four have regularly been performed on stage up and down the land. And to anyone who enjoys their wit sharp and acerbic, his plays are brilliant.
Wilde wrote nine plays in all (not quite the 39 that are attributed to Shakespeare but then Wilde did die at 46, and in fact wrote nothing much after his spell in prison) and of these it is the four aforementioned drawing-room plays that are the most prominent: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The latter, sub-titled a Trivial Comedy for Serious People, was first performed on 14ᵗʰ February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre in London. It is a farcical comedy featuring two young men-about-town assuming double lives — and the name Ernest — whilst wooing the two young women of their affections.
The play parodies contemporary social mores and manners, and introduces two great supporting characters in the form of the formidable Lady Bracknell and the fussy governess Miss Prism. With the best quips, Lady Bracknell is a bitingly comedic character, played over the years in various incarnations by Edith Evans, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Gwen Taylor (and even David Suchet). Hers is the line “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” and of course the famously haughty exclamation “A handbag?!”. Watch Judi Dench’s version in the “interrogation” clip below (though she chooses to almost whisper the handbag line instead of going for the full-blown outraged exclamation of Edith Evans et al).
The successful opening night marked the zenith of Wilde’s career but even as he was basking in the plaudits from the appreciative audience, forces were gathering that would lead to his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) was Wilde’s lover, was scheming to throw a bunch of rotten vegetables at the playwright at the end of the performance. This act of retribution was thwarted by security but soon the feud would lead to a series of legal trials between March to May 1895 which would result in Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment for homosexual acts. Despite the play’s early success, Wilde’s disgrace sadly caused it to be closed in May after 86 performances.
I have just finished reading Raymond Carver’s collection of disquieting short stories, Short Cuts, which inspired the subject of today’s blog, Robert Altman’s 1993 movie of the same name. Carver was a master of the sub-genre of literary fiction dubbed “dirty realism” by American journalist Bill Buford. Dirty realism is characterised by depicting the seamier side of life, with downbeat characters suffering from a kind of internal desperation brought about by their particular life circumstances. Before full-time writing, Carver had worked in California in the fifties and sixties in a variety of jobs — delivery man, janitor, library assistant, sawmill labourer — and perhaps internalised material from seeing people living lives of quiet desperation (to quote Henry David Thoreau). His stories of ordinary people at breaking point inspired Robert Altman to make the masterpiece we’re about to discuss.
Filmed from a screenplay by Altman and Frank Barhydt, Short Cuts was inspired by nine of Carver’s short stories (culled largely from his collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, published in 1976). It was set in Los Angeles (in contrast to the original Pacific Northwest backdrop of Carver’s stories) and traces the lives of twenty two principal characters, loosely connected to one another in one way or another. The stellar cast includes Matthew Modine, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert Downey Jr., Madeleine Stowe, Chris Penn, Jack Lemmon, Frances McDormand, Lori Singer, Andie MacDowell, Buck Henry, Lily Tomlin, actress and singer Annie Ross, and musicians Huey Lewis, Lyle Lovett, and Tom Waits.
The film begins with a fleet of helicopters spraying for medflies, which brings various characters together along the flight path. To this backdrop, and with the sultry nightclub jazz songs of Annie Ross as the incidental music, we see the multiple characters in their various scenarios slowly falling apart. There is too much by way of plot to describe here, but the stories play out in tandem and often loop back on themselves as we see characters familiar from earlier scenes in the movie appearing in different contexts later.
I called it a masterpiece for good reason: the actors absolutely nail the theme of dysfunction. There are heart-breaking scenes, but also mundane ones that nonetheless masterfully display the human condition thanks to the quality of the actors. It’s a psychological drama but a comic one too, and it swings from tragedy to comedy and back again. It is, like Carver’s original stories, highly disquieting but well worth the experience. Here is the film trailer to whet your appetite but watch the full three hours for an extraordinary ride.
We all have our favourite Christmas songs. Most of these we like through sheer tradition – songs like Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody (1973) or Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime (1979) are just as part of the Christmas landscape, ingrained by sheer repetition, as Christmas trees and Father Christmas. I have delved into Spotify to explore Christmas songs from way back, many of which you no longer hear on the radio but which nonetheless are often very enjoyable – check out Kay Starr’s (Everybody’s Waitin’ for) The Man with the Bag (1950) or Mitch Miller’s Must Be Santa (1960) to name just two worthy old classics (I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan’s cover of the latter).
However, the Christmas song that resonates the most with me remains Greg Lake’s glorious debut solo single in 1975, I Believe in Father Christmas. It manages to encapsulate the required Christmas magic whilst remaining a great piece of music in its own right. Greg Lake wrote the song initially with a view to protesting at the commercialisaton of Christmas, but the lyrics provided by King Crimson co-founder Pete Sinfield brought it back on track as a picture-postcard Christmas song (albeit with a theme of lost innocence as the narrator “saw through the disguise” and seems a bit disgruntled about broken promises regarding snow and peace on Earth, but never mind).
The instrumental melody between the verses comes from the “Troika” portion of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, written for the 1934 Soviet film of the same name, and provides a very Christmassy, sleighbell-heavy motif. This was added at the suggestion of Greg’s bandmate from ELP, Keith Emerson, who was no stranger to incorporating themes and motifs from classical music. An orchestra and choir were added too, contributing to an ebullient musical finale. The song was recorded at Abbey Road studios, and the video was shot on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and in the West Bank.
The song was released in November 1975 and got to number two in the UK singles chart, held off the number one slot by a certain Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Lake commented: “I got beaten by one of the greatest records ever made. I would’ve been pissed off if I’d been beaten by Cliff (Richard).”
I don’t get out on boats very often, admittedly, but there is a very appealing aesthetic, isn’t there, of being on a boat in a slow-flowing river in the middle of summer? Think of punting down the river Cam, with the hum of insects in the hot air, a straw boater shielding your eyes from the sun, and a hamper full of posh grub and champers (and some friend doing the actual punting). I’m thinking Brideshead Revisited, though it does occurs that that would have been the river Churwell, it being based in Oxford, and anyway, the nearest I’ve got to that in recent years is hiring a rowing boat for half an hour on the river Nidd at Knaresborough.
And then there’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome, perhaps the single most representative novel to treat the general theme of messing about in boats. Published in 1889, the comic novel describes a two-week boating holiday on the Thames, from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back again. The three men consist of the narrator “J” and his two friends George and Harris, along with a fox terrier named Montmorency (and plenty of tea, whisky, and pipe tobacco). Their voyage is punctuated by stop-offs at boarding houses and pubs and historical sites, and the three men argue and squabble throughout the trip, alternating between comic riffs and bants, anecdotes, and musings about timeworn truths.
The book actually started out with the intent to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, inspired by a real-life boating holiday Jerome had spent with his wife on a Thames skiff. However, humorous elements began to take over (Jerome had already cut his teeth in the genre of humorous writing with his 1886 essay collection, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow) and he soon abandoned the travel guide idea in favour of the comic novel. He swapped out his wife for two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel (called Harris in the book), who evidently offered more by way of comic resource than poor old Mrs Jerome (One Man and his Wife in a Boat perhaps doesn’t quite cut it)!
Three Men in a Boat, Penguin 1985
The book was a roaring success, and although his subsequent writings never quite hit those heights (his 1900 sequel about a cycling tour in Germany titled Three Men on the Bummel was only moderately successful), his humour lives on to this day in Three Men in a Boat which remains widely read and is as fresh and witty as the day it was written.
It probably comes as no surprise to learn that many of the comedy set pieces concern victuals; here’s an excerpt in which the gastronomically incompetent men try to puddle together an Irish stew from the leftovers in their hamper:
George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes. I should never have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left—at least none worth speaking of. George came and had a look at it—it was about the size of a pea-nut. He said: “Oh, that won’t do! You’re wasting them. You must scrape them.” So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling. They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes—all bumps and warts and hollows. We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes. Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves. I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess. It seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes. It shows you what can be done with economy and care. George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling. We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot. He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those in. George said they would thicken the gravy. I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say. We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments.
Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is perhaps not a widely known name outside of the States, but he was one of the greats of middle 20th century American art. His oeuvre was American Regionalism, the realist art movement that depicted scenes from the rural, small-town America of the Midwest. Land and people, painted by an artist with an appreciation for nature and the ability to fire the imagination. He was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, into an established art-oriented family, his father being the celebrated artist and illustrator N C Wyeth. Andrew was brought up on the art of Winslow Homer, the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and was thus inspired intellectually as well as artistically.
One of Wyeth’s best-known works is his tempera painting Christina’s World, which is held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; it was painted in 1948, when he was 31 years old. The work depicts his neighbour, Christina Olson, sprawled on a dry field facing her house in the distance, in Cushing, Maine. Christina had a degenerative muscular disorder that rendered her unable to walk, and she spent most of her time at home. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere, and Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across the field.
Christina’s World
Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the MoMA, bought the painting for $1,800 and it gradually grew in popularity to the point that today, it is considered an icon of American art. The Olson house itself has been preserved and renovated to match its appearance in Christina’s World, and because of Wyeth’s profile, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011.
Philistines might say that they “don’t get” poetry because it’s dressed up in flowery language and they can’t understand it. If the objective is to tell a story or communicate a message, they wonder, why dress it up in poetic language so that the meaning is obscured and only serves to create work for the reader to tease out the meaning? Well, I don’t know if such radical philistines actually exist, but I do know that the beauty of poetry is part and parcel of its ability to challenge and inspire the imagination. Neuroscience‑y types will tell you that poetic language bypasses the rational left hemisphere and enters the imaginal realm of the right brain, where metaphorical connections can be made and ideas fused.
Sometimes, though, the poet doesn’t even need to bamboozle us with fancy language – he can literally omit key information from the narrative altogether. One such poem that springs to mind is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners which relies entirely on the reader’s imagination. The Listeners is one of de la Mare’s most famous poems and certainly one of his most atmospheric. Its theme is the nocturnal encounter between an unnamed “Traveller” and a house inhabited by mysterious “Listeners”. The poem is deliberate in its posing of questions without providing any answers; it’s for the reader to fill in the gaps or, more likely, simply bask in the mystery.
The key characters — the Traveller, the Listeners, and the mysterious “Them” for whom the Traveller has a message — are all unnamed and sparsely described. We know nothing about this Traveller (other than that his eyes are ‘grey’, a nondescript colour that is presumably quite deliberate) nor why he has come knocking on the door of this house. Who are the Listeners, to whom the Traveller declares that he has kept his “word”? We do not know what “word” he is keeping, nor to whom he is keeping it.
But who cares? De la Mare makes great use of sound imagery in this poem, creating a semantic field of sound to intensify the sense of atmosphere. We can imagine how these noises would cut into the silence of a forest by moonlight. The rap on the door, the flutter of the disturbed bird, the words that go echoing through the house, the horse chomping on the forest floor, and when he finally goes off into the darkness, there is the sound of “iron on stone” before the “silence surged softly backward”. The noises in the scene are almost an act of violence upon it.
By the poem’s end, we still don’t know what promise is being kept on this night, nor who the people involved are, but, at the very least, we’re intrigued…marvellous stuff!
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller’s call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, ’Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:— ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter and printmaker and a leading light of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg to a successful goldsmith, he lived in the same street where his godfather Anton Koberger was turning Gutenberg’s printing press into a huge commercial enterprise and publishing the famous Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Albrecht learnt the basics of goldsmithing and drawing under his father and his precocious skills in the latter led him to undergo an apprenticeship under printmaker Michael Wolgemut in which he learnt the art of creating woodcuts for books. After his Wanderjahre – essentially gap years – in which he travelled to study under various masters, he set up a workshop and began to establish a reputation for his high-quality woodcut prints.
Dürer’s woodprints were mainly religious in nature, often in sets such as his sixteen designs for the Apocalypse, the twelve scenes of the Passion, a series of eleven on the Holy Family and Saints, and twenty woodcuts on the Life of the Virgin. He was also particularly renowned for his three Meisterstiche, master prints that are often grouped together because of their perceived quality, namely Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). He also made secular woodcuts, such as his famous Rhinoceros (1515), which he never actually saw but created his print using an anonymous written description and brief sketch of an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon in 1515.
However, today we focus on his panel painting in oil, Self-Portrait (or Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight), held today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Painted early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, Self-Portrait is the last – and most personal and iconic — of his three painted self-portraits. It is remarkable for its directness – does it remind you of anyone? Yes, its resemblance to many earlier representations of Christ has not gone unnoticed: there are clear similarities with the conventions of religious painting, including its symmetry and dark tones, and full-frontal confrontation with the viewer. He even raises his hands to the middle of his chest as if in the act of blessing.
If that is the case, isn’t that blasphemy? Sounds somewhat dangerous, no? Perhaps we’re projecting too much intolerance onto the fifteenth (well, newly-sixteenth) century, or perhaps Dürer’s motivation was simply a way to (literally) imitate Christ, which could be seen as a good thing. Art historian Joseph Koerner interprets it squarely as a pioneering challenge to the norms of self-portraiture, albeit putting it in that particularly verbose way only art historians can do:
“By transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work or art”.
Last week’s University Challenge asked which literary work opens with these lines: “We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of bully beef and beans”. Like a shot, I metaphorically spat out my cornflakes in a garbled attempt to get my answer out before the brainiacs on the quiz show – “err, err, I know this…orl-quiet-onza-western-front…”! I had recognised the line due to having only just read the book, giving me one of those serendipitously rare advantages in TV’s toughest quiz.
All Quiet on the Western Front (in the original German, Im Westen nichts Neues, literally “In the West, nothing new”) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Erich Maria Remarque, drawn from his experiences as a German veteran of World War I. The book is a first-person, present-tense portrayal of life in the German trenches in the Great War, a story of extreme physical and mental trauma, punctuated by boredom and ennui. The narrator, Paul, has come to the trenches straight from school — reminding us of the young age of these lads — and he is accompanied by several classmates, all spurred on by their teacher to enlist and none of whom will return home.
It is rightly considered to be one of the greatest war novels of all time, and it comes as no surprise to learn that it was one of the books banned and burned by Nazi Germany in the 1930s (who weren’t keen on the subversive “war is hell and really isn’t worth it” tone of the book). It has been translated to the big screen on three occasions, most recently, — and successfully — by Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation, which won four Academy Awards.
When the novel isn’t focused on the nightmare of trench warfare, we learn of life during the “quiet” times in between action on the front line, marked in random order by boredom, black humour, camaraderie, and obsession with finding food to supplement their meagre rations. The excerpt I have chosen below describes one such illicit mission by Paul and his mate Kat to steal a goose from regimental headquarters. This theme of hard-won sustenance, which probably only those who have experienced genuine hunger can truly appreciate, is exquisitely described. It has an air of comedy caper about it, but ends with the sublime satisfaction of satiety, a rare moment of calm before the inevitable return to reality.
Kat hoists me up. I rest my foot in his hands and climb over the wall.
Kat keeps watch below.
I wait a few moments to accustom my eyes to the darkness. Then I recognise the shed. Softly I steal across, lift the peg, pull it out and open the door.
I distinguish two white patches. Two geese, that’s bad: if I grab one the other will cackle. Well, both of them–if I’m quick, it can be done.
I make a jump. I catch hold of one and the next instant the second. Like a madman I bash their heads against the wall to stun them. But I haven’t quite enough weight. The beasts cackle and strike out with their feet and wings. I fight desperately, but Lord! what a kick a goose has! They struggle and I stagger about. In the dark these white patches are terrifying. My arms have grown wings and I’m almost afraid of going up into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in my fists.
Then the row begins; one of them gets his breath and goes off like an alarm clock. Before I can do anything, something comes in from outside; I feel a blow, lie outstretched on the floor, and hear awful growls. A dog. I steal a glance to the side, he makes a snap at my throat. I lie still and tuck my chin into my collar.
It’s a bulldog. After an eternity he withdraws his head and sits down beside me. But if I make the least movement he growls. I consider. The only thing to do is to get hold of my small revolver, and that too before anyone arrives. Inch by inch I move my hand toward it.
I have the feeling that it lasts an hour. The slightest movement and then an awful growl; I lie still, then try again. When at last I have the revolver my hand starts to tremble. I press it against the ground and say over to myself: Jerk the revolver up, fire before he has a chance to grab, and then jump up.
Slowly I take a deep breath and become calmer. Then I hold my breath, whip up the revolver, it cracks, the dog leaps howling to one side, I make for the door of the shed and fall head over heels over one of the scuttering geese.
At full speed I seize it again, and with a swing toss it over the wall and clamber up. No sooner am I on top than the dog is up again as lively as ever and springs at me. Quickly I let myself drop. Ten paces away stands Kat with the goose under his arm. As soon as he sees me we run.
At last we can take a breather. The goose is dead, Kat saw to that in a moment. We intend to roast it at once so that nobody will be any wiser. I fetch a dixie and wood from the hut and we crawl into a small deserted lean-to which we use for such purposes. The single window space is heavily curtained. There is a sort of hearth, an iron plate set on some bricks. We kindle a fire.
Kat plucks and cleans the goose. We put the feathers carefully to one side. We intend to make two cushions out of them with the inscription: “Sleep soft under shell-fire.” The sound of the gunfire from the front penetrates into our refuge. The glow of the fire lights up our faces, shadows dance on the wall. Sometimes a heavy crash and the lean-to shivers. Aeroplane bombs. Once we hear a stifled cry. A hut must have been hit.
Aeroplanes drone; the tack-tack of machine guns breaks out. But no light that could be observed shows from us. We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.
We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common–now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.
It takes a long time to roast a goose, even when it is young and fat. So we take turns. One bastes it while the other lies down and sleeps. A grand smell gradually fills the hut.
Then he says: “It’s done.”
“Yes, Kat.”
I stir myself. In the middle of the room shines the brown goose. We take out our collapsible forks and our pocket-knives and each cuts off a leg. With it we have army bread dipped in gravy. We eat slowly and with gusto.
“How does it taste, Kat?”
“Good! And yours?”
“Good, Kat.”
We are brothers and press on one another the choicest pieces. Afterwards I smoke a cigarette and Kat a cigar. There is still a lot left.
Erich Maria Remarque
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
