Literature

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

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You could have safely bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to visit a certain trinity of British university dons who have done more for the literary fantasy genre worldwide than, well, any other trinity of university dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappé of children’s fantasy literature – I am talking of course about Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accumulator you would be quids in, too, because I shall certainly be visiting C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandaddy, that long-time maths professor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).

Lewis Carroll, what an interesting character! First and foremost, he was a mathematician and long-time university scholar, specialising in geometry, algebra and logic; under his real name, he published eleven books on maths-related subjects. He was also an avid puzzler and is credited with the invention of the “word ladder” – you know it, that puzzle that involves changing one word into another, one letter at a time. He loved word play, amply displayed in his nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

However, it is of course Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) for which Lewis Carroll will be forever remembered. As we all know, it details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rabbit hole”?) into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Carroll first outlined his story whilst out on rowing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often undertook with members of the Liddell family (Henry Liddell being the Dean at Christ Church).

When he told the story to Henry’s daughter Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the manuscript to another friend and mentor, the novelist George MacDonald. The enthusiasm of the MacDonald children for the story encouraged Carroll to seek publication, and so he approached Macmillan Publishers, who loved it. After the possible alternative titles were rejected – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour – the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 (followed up of course by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is history.

The artist John Tenniel provided a brilliant set of wood-engraved illustrations for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the universally familiar characters here:

Lewis Carroll
Art

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Kalevala Paintings (1890s)

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Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.

Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late – during the 19th century – but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.

This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.

The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!

Aleksi Gallen-Kallela
Literature

L M Montgomery’s Anne Of Green Gables (1908)

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Ah, the bookshelf in our classroom during my later years at primary school, I remember it well. Replete with titles and illustrated covers promising tales for children of adventure and derring-do in exotic lands: Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island. It had all the girls’ classics, too: Black Beauty, Little Women, What Katy Did, Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables. Of course, I never read any of the latter books…until recently, that is, when I finally read L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, having been inspired to do so by watching Netflix’s excellent Canadian TV adaptation, Anne with an E (2017).

The novel was published in 1908 by Canadian author L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874-1942). Set in the late 19ᵗʰ century, it recounts the adventures of 11-year-old orphan girl Anne Shirley sent by mistake to two middle-aged siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who run their farm in the close-knit community of Avonlea in Prince Edward Island, Canada. They had planned to adopt a boy who could help them with the farm work and so when Anne arrives, their first instinct is to send her straight back. However, her exuberant pleading persuades them to keep her for a trial period and soon her personality wins them over.

Amybeth McNulty as Anne Shirley in “Anne with an E”

Anne is talkative to the extreme, hugely imaginative, dramatic, an extractor of joy from life wherever it may exist, and a touchstone of youthful idealism, if a little prone to defensiveness over her red hair, freckles and pale complexion. She is also insistent that her name should always be spelt with an “e” at the end, hence the title of the TV adaptation. In this she was played impeccably by Amybeth McNulty, the more so now that I have read the book and see how accurately she nailed the character. The whole series turned out to be a largely faithful rendering of the book and certainly it was a heart-warming depiction of a simple turn-of-the-century lifestyle in rural Canada, well wroth the watch.

Since its publication, Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies – that’s actually not far behind J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books albeit having had a century longer to sell copies! And it has that accolade for good reason, so who knows, I may even have to delve into Black Beauty or Heidi next?

Anne of Green Gables, 1st edition book cover
L M Montgomery
Art

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)

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Last Sunday I popped along to see Monet’s iconic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the centrepiece of a nice collection of key loans featuring various French en plein air precursors to Impressionism. However, whilst there, I was reminded that the gallery had also recently acquired for its permanent collection a piece by an artist a little closer to home, Leeds-born John Atkinson Grimshaw, known not for the Impressionistic brushwork or garden scenes of Monet and his ilk but for realistic nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. The painting is Liverpool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine example of Grimshaw’s oeuvre. It was also something of a coup for York Art Gallery, given that it had been accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from a collection and had been allocated to the gallery for the bargainous price of £0.

Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked destined for a normal, anonymous life –  he married his cousin Frances at age twenty and got a job as clerk for the Great Northern Railway. However, the young John had an artistic gift and an ambition, and it must have taken a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dismay his parents by packing in his job and launching himself as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His primary artistic influence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he painted with accurate colour and lighting and with vivid detail. Although he did start out painting a variety of genres, Grimshaw was later drawn to depicting moonlit views of city streets in Leeds and London, and dockside scenes in Hull, Liverpool, and Glasgow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked later in his career in his Chelsea studios, said: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.

Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” nocturnes were sharply focused and almost photographic in their quality, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than concentrating on the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial life (that he would have had no trouble finding), Grimshaw imbued his paintings with a lyrical evocation of the urban landscape and there is poetry in his captured mists, reflected streetlight in wet pavements, and dark figures wrapped up against the weather. His twilight cities became his “brand” and became very popular with his middle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were living at Knostrup Old Hall, in the Temple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.

Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a winter’s day like this.

 

Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Film, TV, and Theatre

Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

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The Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley is the oldest indie cinema in Leeds and has been continuously showing films since 1912. As such it is regarded with fondness by much of the north Leeds community and long may it continue. Anyway, it has a classics night every month, where viewers can watch a series of nostalgic ads and previews from back in the day, prior to settling back with a fairly-priced box of popcorn to enjoy a classic movie, selected for its historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Last month, for example, I went to see Hitchcock’s Rear Window; next month I’m tempted by Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager; and this month I went to see the subject of this blog, John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The term “neo-Western” does not signify a western movie as such, and instead implies the use of certain themes and motifs redolent of westerns but set in more modern times (in this case, 1945). Really, it’s a crime drama but it contains the wide, open plains and desert landscapes of the western, and Spencer Tracy’s “stranger comes to town and is met with unfriendly suspicion” persona is top-drawer Clint Eastwood.

Tracy plays a one-armed stranger, John Macreedy, who disembarks from the train that rarely stops in the isolated desert hamlet of Black Rock and is soon put under hostile scrutiny from the locals who lounge on the wooden verandas of the saloon and bar-and-grill and wonder who the hell this new guy is and what the hell does he want? At this point I should say that if I were harbouring a dark secret – which you can be sure these Black Rock locals certainly are – and a stranger comes to town asking questions, I would put on a friendly and cooperative façade to deflect suspicion. This lot, however, opt for the acute hostility and evasiveness approach and thus come across as guilty as sin from the get-go, with Borgnine and Marvin in particular pushing the envelope in the “I’ve clearly got something to hide” department.

Still, Macreedy’s been asking questions about a certain Japanese-American gentleman named Komoko, but nobody seems to want to engage. Robert Ryan’s character Reno Smith is clearly in charge and holds the rest of the town in his thrall, including the ineffectual, alcoholic sheriff. Smith claims that Komoko was simply interned during World War II but also reveals his virulent anti-Japanese sentiment developed after Pearl Harbor – we the audience are only too aware that something dodgy has gone down and not only that but Macreedy himself needs to be in fear for his own life. Macreedy gradually breaks down the omerta of the townsfolk and begins to separate the real culprits from the simply scared, some of whom are inspired by Macreedy to step up. It’s a tour de force of psychological drama, with great tough-guy dialogue and the stunning backdrop of the Mohave desert, and well worth my punt in venturing out on a Wednesday night!

Let’s watch Macreedy, despite his one arm, getting the better of thug Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine), in this tense encounter.

Spencer Tracy and John Ericson in Bad Day at Black Rock
Music

The Animals’ The House Of The Rising Sun (1964)

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If you’re a music history enthusiast, hours of fun can be had perusing the Roud Folk Song Index (https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud), the online database of around a quarter of a million references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, and named after its compiler Steve Roud. It correlates versions of traditional folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across the UK and North America. Take Roud number 6393, for instance: The House of the Rising Sun.

Although widely known from the most successful contemporary version, recorded by the Animals in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song with deep roots: it was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably goes back much further, emanating from the tradition of so-called “broadside ballads”. A “broadside” was a sheet of cheap paper used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to distribute news and so on, but also, most popularly, ballads. “Ballads” were narrative rhymes and songs developing from the minstrelsy of the earlier fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which told folk stories on every topic under the sun, from legends and heroes and religion to the more prosaic side of life.

The House of the Rising Sun ballad tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans, and is a classic cautionary tale, appealing to his listeners to avoid the same fate:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

Folk song collector Alan Lomax noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in at least two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs (Leeds dwellers may be familiar with the one on Kirkstall Road, albeit now sadly disused). He hypothesised that the location of the said drinking hole-cum-brothel was then simply relocated from England to the US by roaming performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called She was a Rum One (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning:

If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun,
There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one.

The oldest known recording of the song, under the title Rising Sun Blues, is by Appalachian artists Tom Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather who had got married around the time of the Civil War, suggesting that the song was written years before the turn of the century.

In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version; Lead Belly recorded two versions in the forties; Joan Baez recorded it in 1960 on her eponymous debut album; Nina Simone recorded a version for the live album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962; and Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. But it was the Animals, Newcastle’s own blues-rock band made up of Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine and John Steel, who scored a transatlantic number one hit single with it in 1964 and made it their signature tune.

The Animals, The House of the Rising Sun

 

Music

John Newton’s Amazing Grace (1772)

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Amazing Grace is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world – who hasn’t been exposed countless times to these iconic opening lines?

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see

It was written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725-1807), drawn very much from personal experience. He had grown up without any particular religious bent and after a time having been pressganged into service with the Royal Navy, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. However, in 1748 he was on a vessel caught up in a storm so violent that he begged God for mercy and underwent (having presumably got his feet back on terra firma) something of a spiritual conversion. Thereafter, Newton gave up seafaring, studied Christian theology, and became a vocal abolitionist. He once was lost but now was found.

Newton was ordained into the Church of England in 1764, and took a post as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he met and began to write hymns with William Cowper (who himself would become a celebrated poet and hymnodist). They wrote Amazing Grace to illustrate a sermon Newton was giving on New Year’s Day 1773 with the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God. It debuted in print in 1779 in their collaborative Olney Hymns.

At this stage, Amazing Grace, like all the other Olney hymns, was still relatively obscure but it took off in the United States when it was picked up and extensively used by Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Protestant revival movement of the early 19th century (the so-called Second Great Awakening). In 1835, American composer William Walker set the words to the tune known as New Britain and this is the version you’ll hear today.

The song has unsurprisingly become a staple of Gospel music, and has also crossed over into secular music with a particular influence in folk music. It’s been recorded thousands of times in the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards; today though, I offer a version by American folk singer Judy Collins, recorded in 1993 with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.

John Newton
Film, TV, and Theatre

Phil Cornwell and John Sessions in Stella Street (1997)

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A British TV comedy series that perhaps fell under the radar a little bit (you can actually find people who never saw or heard of it), Stella Street was nonetheless a great find when it began airing in 1997 and continued over four series to 2001. Its somewhat bizarre premise is that an ordinary street in suburban Surbiton is peopled by a group of bigtime celebrities going about their lives in ordinary, suburban fashion, but adhering to some well-known and exaggerated stereotypes pertaining to said celebs.

The show was conceived and written by John Sessions, Phil Cornwell and Peter Richardson, with the main characters played by Sessions and Cornwell (and Ronni Ancona for some episodes). The celebrities chosen to live in Stella Street were presumably influenced by the performers’ ability to do great impressions of them and whose personas lent themselves to some great send-up comedy. The programme takes the form of a mockumentary with filming done on a handheld camera and Cornwell as Michael Caine talking directly to the camera to introduce characters and situations (just as he does in the 1966 film Alfie).

Jack Nicholson is portrayed as the inveterate womanising bad-ass of his stereotype (or his real personality?) complete with bad taste Hawaiian shirts not exactly suited to the British climate. Michael Caine is full-on Sixties’ Michael Caine with the trademark laconic vocal delivery, shock of ginger hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Roger Moore is the quintessential English gentleman with impeccable manners, and with a loneliness theme ruthlessly exploited by Sessions. David Bowie is the self-effacing and slightly awkward superstar staying true to his Bromley roots. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards run the local grocery store, Mick with massive enthusiasm, Keith with time-worn, devil-may-care cynicism and a gleam in his eye.

Let’s enjoy a montage of Cornwell and Sessions bringing these characters to life: the mayhem of Mick and Keef’s corner shop, and then a glorious vignette of David Bowie and Roger Moore exchanging spectacularly mundane Christmas presents (with Roger Moore taking politeness to the next level when gifted an underwhelming £10 book token).

Mick and Keef
Film, TV, and Theatre

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

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A few months ago I went to a screening of the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at local venue the Old Woollen in Farsley. The film is a quintessential piece of German Expressionist cinema from over a century ago and a fascinating insight into celluloid creativity during the era of the Weimar Republic. As fun as it is, with its story of a mad hypnotist inducing a brainwashed somnambulist to commit murders, I wanted to look at an even more quintessential movie from the era, one that most people have come across at some point, the great 1927 science-fiction masterpiece, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976).

Lang has been cited as one of the most influential of filmmakers of all time, and he is credited with pioneering both the sci-fi genre (Metropolis, Woman in the Moon) and film noir (M). He didn’t shy away from producing epically long films, either, like the 4.5 hour Dr Mabuse the Gambler or the two-part Die Nibelungen based on the epic poem Nibelungenlied, but the one film that captures the zeitgeist of the auteur’s work is undoubtedly Metropolis.

It was written in collaboration with Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou and based on her 1925 novel of the same name. Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia prefiguring Blade Runner and bringing to mind themes from Orwell and indeed Mary Shelley with its own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of the scientist Rotwang’s iconic robot the Maschinenmensch.

Meanwhile, the film’s aesthetics, with Gothic touches, draw heavily from the Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design movements of the time. We see a world of colossal skyscrapers from which a wealthy elite lords it over the down-trodden masses of the underground who toil in abject conditions to keep the machines of the society running.

One day a member of this elite, one Freder Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), has an epiphany when presented with what life is like for the poor, by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm, who also plays the Maschinenmensch), and the two conspire to change the society and bring about social justice. As such, it can be construed as a rather simplistic morality tale, but there’s no simplicity in the stylisation and brilliant technical effects, which serve to create a remarkable world, both visually beautiful and powerful. Enjoy the theatrical trailer, below, with an excellent soundtrack by Gottfried Huppertz.

Fritz Lang
Music

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (1874)

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The Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) wins my ‘coolest composer’s name’ award, with honourable mention to German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) who of course is not to be confused with mellow British pop singer Arnold Dorsey who used Engelbert Humperdinck as a stage name. Mussorgsky was one of the “The Mighty Five” alongside Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, and (another contender for the cool name award) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Together, these five fashioned a distinct national style of Russian classical music in the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century.

Mussorgsky’s works were inspired by Russian history and folklore, such as his opera Boris Godunov (about the Tsar who ruled Russia between 1598 and 1605), Night on Bald Mountain (a series of compositions inspired by Russian literary works and legends), and Pictures at an Exhibition. This latter piece is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874, and inspired by an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Hartmann was as devoted as Mussorgsky to making intrinsically Russian art and the two had become firm friends. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual artwork.

Art critic Vladimir Stasov described the piece as Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.”

The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, but has also became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers, such as Maurice Ravel’s 1922 adaptation for orchestra. The excerpt below is the opening promenade from the Ravel version, as played by the National Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York. This is another tune where I say “I bet you know it…”.

Incidentally, prog rock trio Emerson Lake and Palmer did a version of Pictures at an Exhibition, just as they did a version of another blog topic here, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Modest Mussorgsky

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