The Adventure of Crow Crag: Withnail & I as Homes and Watson

Recently, I sat down to watch a double bill of The Big Lebowski and Withnail & I on my home cinema system (a laptop, plugged into a projector, plugged into a hi-fi system). The connection between the two films might not be immediately apparent. However, as The Big Lebowski is said to be loosely based on Raymond Chandler's novel, The Big Sleep, so Withnail & I can be seen as the misadventures of Sherlock Holmes and John. H Watson.

It should first be said that The Big Lebowski is based on the series of Philip Marlowe novels, rather than any particular book. The only real connection between the plots of The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski is that the Dude and Marlowe are both followed, but for different reasons. The explanation that the "fellow shamus" gives to the Dude is taken from The Little Sister. The sequence where the Dude is drugged, thrown into the road, and ends up in front of the Chief of Police in Malibu is straight out of Farewell My Lovely.

The Big Lebowski also owes more than a little to Dashiell Hammett's novel and film, The Maltese Falcon; but then Chandler used Sam Spade as his model for Philip Marlowe. Both PIs were played to smouldering effect by Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s. As much as the Dude is meant to be the stoner Marlowe, making a number of erroneous deductions during the course of the film, he is as much the stoner Bogart, retaining the same acerbic wit and stubborn refusal to give a straight answer to any question. And you know what they say about not Bogarting that joint.

By the same token, Withnail and I are the drunk Holmes and Watson. There is Withnail, the rude, high-functioning, borderline sociopath, with a love for acting and the overly dramatic. Then there is "I" (Peter: Withnail refers to him as such when they're at Monty's). He is Boswell to Withnail's Johnson, faithfully recording his friend's slow decent into psychosis.

The pair go off into the English countryside, a feature of many a Holmes adventure, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles. At Crow Crag (the cottage in which they stay), the most dangerous beast to affront Withnail & I is the farmer's randy bull. Although, of course, the randy bull foreshadows the appearance of Monty in the night. Like Monty, the bull ignores Withnail, going straight for Peter. With his unwanted amorous attentions, Monty is the real hound here.

With a quick blast of All Along the Watchtower, Withnail & I leave the London of 1969 for a Cumbria that could be 1869 if not for the farmer's tractor. There are rambles out on the moor and encounters with local types in the public house. Like the Dude, Withnail & I make a number of dubious deductions along the way. That Jake is out to get them. That Monty breaking in at night is Jake coming to kill them. The proper way to cook a chicken. Peter's paranoia that Withnail is planning to sell him out to Monty, however, is well founded, leading to a final showdown with the hound in the dead of night. The beast is slain with several shots to the heart, and Withnail & I return to the capital and Camden, just on the other side of Regent's Park from 221B Baker Street.

Now, I'm not for one moment suggesting that Bruce Robinson, in writing Withnail & I, deliberately set out to write a comedy based on the adventures of Holmes and Watson. The high-functioning detective and his faithful companion is a common trope in thriller writing. It has been used time and again by crime writers since the time the Holmes stories were first published. Conan-Doyle modeled Holmes closely on Edgar Allen Poe's detective, Dupin, and his bespoke biographer, who unlike Watson remains nameless. The Dude has Walter, even Sam Spade has Miles Archer, at least until the end of the first act. The only real lone wolf is Philip Marlowe, steadfastly singular and alone, telling it like it is, straight from the horse's mouth, rather than through an intermediary. I think that's the reason why I love Marlowe best of all.

Few films end as poignantly as Withnail & I, with Withnail quoting Hamlet in the rain (Act II, Scene II, 278-292). The poignancy is redoubled if you're familiar with the lines and know that Withnail's rendition is far from perfect. He misses out bits of the speech and muddles others. Withnail has ambitions to play the Dane, but understudying Konstantin is probably a stretch for him at this point.

As Watson leaves 221B Baker Street to marry Mary Morstan at the end of The Sign of Four, so Peter leaves London to play the lead in a play up north. As Withnail stands, misquoting Shakespeare in the rain, you fear for him, because you know he will most likely end up as one of the "wankers on the site" that he derided at the beginning of the film. Much as we enjoy watching his antics, Withnail is not Marlowe: Neither is he Holmes. There will be no be no bee hives, or retirement to the Sussex downs for Withnail. Only oblivion awaits.

Venice

Final instalment of my travelling trilogy

Venice

Ah, Venice. What a strange few days of my life. Already been to Dublin and London on this trip and by the time I land in Venice, I am virtually skint. Thankful to find a decent supermarket with cheap meat and cheap wine.

My first time in Italy. It’s thunderstorm season and the plane circles the airport for half an hour waiting for conditions to improve, which the pilot explains on landing are the worst he’s experienced in twenty years of flying.

It’s already ten o’clock in the evening and I’m panicking that I won’t be able to get into my hostel at night. Over the years it becomes a recurrent theme of getting into any Italian city late and not being able to find where I’m going. I blindly get onto a waterbus, which takes an age to get to San Marco Square, detouring and dropping off via the other Venetian islands. The crew play Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time through a portable CD player. I haven’t heard the album in years, but I’m on the water so long I get to listen to everything from Caught From Somewhere in Time, up to and through the eight and half minutes of Alexander the Great.

Humming Stranger in a Strange Land to myself, I disembark. When lost late at night in a country where you don’t speak the language, it’s always best to adopt a persona of friendly but pathetic. I diagonally cross San Marco with some vague homing instinct for where I’m heading, the rising waters of the lagoon seeping up through grates in the stonework. Once into the narrow streets though, I’m lost and stop strangers every few meters and point at the address on the printed reservation sheet I carry. Most shrug their shoulders, but I guess my features are Italian looking enough that most who don’t know the street find someone who does.

By some kind of tag team or tourist relay with me as the baton, late night walkers and late night drinkers get me to the right street in the middle of the city. The entrance to the hostel though is a nondescript and I manage to walk past it three times, my pacing only arrested by the water’s edge, until I chance upon the right door and ring.

It’s gone midnight, but there’s someone on duty and I’m shown to my room, everyone else already asleep on what are little more than camp beds. The adrenalin is pumping from having got here after the many delays since flying out of Gatwick, but there nothing more to be done but get undressed, find some comedy to listen to on my Walkman (MP3 players being in their infancy) and go to sleep.

More thunder in the night. Out here there’s nowhere else for the lightning to go and it explodes above our heads, jolting everyone awake. A first introduction to my fellow hostellers is half asleep, worried faces illuminated by brief bursts of white hot light in the night. No one sleeps particularly well, even after the storm has moved on. Still, it gives everyone something to talk about over breakfast.

I spend the best part of a week in Venice, but with little money to spare and still being the height of the tourist season in August, three or four hours of queuing has to be endured to get into anywhere worth visiting anyway. Under the circumstances, I walk from one end of the city to the other and back again, lost in my thoughts, reading from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground in out-of-the-way piazzas, people watching at the train station, playing solitaire in the hostel at night and talking to the staff. Marco, who was on duty the night I arrived, is a frequent source of entertainment. The hostel is a family run business, he’s the youngest, tall and handsome, a cliché of an Italian man, well dressed and distracted by every pretty face that crosses his path. He’s good company though, curious and good taste in music. He brings in a guitar for us to take turns playing.

There’s a lot of Americans staying in the hostel, a middle aged couple from the Netherlands and a noisy, self important woman from Canada. In my experience when people talk about that brash American that was in the bar when they were in holiday, bumming everyone out, more often than not that person will turn out to be a Canadian. I’ve known many Canadians and while some of them have been dicks and some excellent company, they’re all mad. This Canadian definitely falls into the dickish end of the spectrum.

There’s also a couple of British people. I don’t remember either of their names, but there a girl who’s picked up or been picked up by Marco’s elder cousin while she’s been staying at the hostel. He’s taking her to Rome. The rest of the family, balding, fat middle aged men, are jealous that she’s not with them. The envy of others is always hilarious when you have no personal stake in the sideshow. Marco’s uncle introduces me to the phrase, ‘flying bitches’, which has no English equivalent I think. It’s like gold digger or something like that. Ain’t misogyny just tragic?

The other Brit here is a guy who works for one of the London radio stations. LBC if I remember rightly. The only bit of paid for culture I get to see when in Venice is spending a morning together at the Guggenheim Museum. Exactly what you expect from a Guggenheim Museum, lots of Cubism, Futurism and Pointillism. Then, after catching the matinee performance of Flying Bitches back at the hostel, I end up falling asleep on my bed listening to a BBC radio adaptation of The Big Sleep (in Dublin and London I’d read Chandler’s Little Sister and The High Window). I wake up in the early evening.

Venice is a strange place, a place I need to return sometime and see a bit of the history, the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica and the like. I’d bet I could also spend a number of days just tracking down traces of Galileo’s life here. I’ve walked over the Rialto Bridge a couple of dozen times on my frequent perambulations. If you go out in the morning, the whole city smells of dog piss, because there is no vegetation and everyone lets their dogs piss in the streets, which evaporates in the rising heat and gives everything a pissy stink.

Venice of course has the advantage of no motor traffic and so it’s a good place to walk around, through streets sometime so narrow that you feel they will narrow down to infinity, or emerge into an entirely different city (or maybe I’ve just read too many Clive Barker novels). Virtually the entire island is stone, although there is a small park well to the east of Saint Marco that I would wander down to a sit on a park bench and watch the overlarge ferries motor by. I wonder how the ships get in when the advantage of Venice, the reason people fled to these islands, was that they were in waters too shallow for warships to invade. That’s a question to which I still don’t know the answer.

As it turns out, instead of catching a waterbus, I could have just got a bus from the airport as far as Venice train station and I would still have had only to walk as far as I did from San Marco. But what would have been the fun in that? The coming of smart phones and Google Maps may take a lot of the frustration out of foreign travel, but it also takes away just as much of the adventure. Part of the romance and the personal of travelling is allowing yourself to be lost and find something unique for you. Serendipity is magical. Knowing where you’re going, well that’s simply overrated.

Get it done.

 

We Heartily Recommend... Three Books Beginning With B

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

Of all of literatures great detectives, Philip Marlowe is one with which I can most identify. I'm a sucker for good prose and the way Marlowe's monologue flows from the page is one of life's simple joys.

But then Marlowe is unique amongst the great detectives. With Holmes, with Marple, with Sam Spade, we are never privy to their inner thoughts, only the occasional wry smile or raised eyebrow in response to a clue revealed. With The Big Sleep and its sequels we hear all too much of Marlowe's inner thoughts and his creator, Raymond Chandler, has to use different tricks than usual to keep the reader guessing. Marlowe describes what he discovers each stage of the way, but never what it all means until the end. He's tricksy, using creative double negatives and fantasies about the private lives of inanimate objects as distractions.

The plot of the Big Sleep is actually culled from a number a Chandler's short stories (as were most of the Marlowe novels). Marlowe is hired by General Sternwood because he is being blackmailed. Along the way Marlowe uncovers pornography and gambling debts and more blackmail and a lot of murder that needs solving.

The advantage of winding together a number of previously published stories is the multiple plot threads unwind so slowly that you barely notice what's really been going on. The true focus of Marlowe's investigation only becomes clear in the final reel. The real mystery in any Marlowe novel is always Marlowe himself. Not the best, but the best known and first of the novels. Read it and immediately move on to Farewell My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Of all the dystopian novels that came out of the first half of the twentieth century, Brave New World best speaks to the times in which we find ourselves. Nineteen-Eighty Four presented us with a vision of life after a Soviet victory. Brave New World shows the flip side of the coin: the nightmare of a consumerist future.

It is the twenty sixth century. Mankind has evolved beyond the need for procreation. Human beings are grown in laboratories, with their development fine tuned and intelligence and creative abilities only allowed to those at the top of the caste system. Sex is a purely recreational activity and pregnancy is regarded as taboo. Boredom and depression are controlled by drugs and the thought of spending time on one's own is considered idiotic.

Into this world enters John. John was born and raised outside of this new society. He grew up on a reservation in New Mexico with only a copy of the collected works of William Shakespeare for an education. He is taken to London and appalled by the immorality of human society, expressing his disgust through Shakespearean passages, including those famous words, 'Oh brave new world, that has such people in it'. It is meant ironically, as indeed did Shakespeare mean it ironically. Just one more English phrase, misused and misunderstood. Huxley returns it to its proper use.

George Orwell said of Nineteen-Eighty Four that it was useless to make predictions about the future as they all ultimately turned out wrong. Indeed, along with the likes of Space 1999 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction's attempts at predicting the future have been at times woeful. Brave New World feels different. This is tyranny through pleasure not brutality, where the disaffected only don't protest because disaffection has been breed out of them. And that's not a twenty sixth century concern, it's something humanity might have to deal with in the next half century. Brave New World is a good place to start revising.

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene

I have a lot of time for Graham Greene. I like people who are contradictions and Greene was certainly that. He converted to Roman Catholicism, was recruited into MI6 prior to World War Two, but also had affairs and spent time smoking opium in Vietnam. His books are comic and they are dramatic, his main characters hapless heroes or ruthless antiheroes. Pinkie Brown is Greene's most antisocial creation of all.

Brighton Rock is the tale of Pinkie's murder of a man called Hale and his efforts to conceal the crime. Pinkie is a young and precocious gangster. His murder of Hale triggers a ruthless grab of power and the narrative arc is like that of a seafront Richard III. Pinkie even has his Anne, a girl called Rose and the only person who could blow his alibi. Brighton Rock is a study in evil and the dark underbelly of Britain's seaside towns in the 1930s.

Graham Greene loved to travel and most of his best novels, Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American, Travels With My Aunt, are international affairs. British set novels like Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair tend to be less adventure romps and more treatises on the nature of religious morality. Pinkie and Rose are both Catholic and yet it is the irreligious Ida who pursues Hale's murderer. Like I said, I like contradictions. Greene had faith and yet he never stopped questioning religion or the people who use is as an excuse.

Brighton Rock is perhaps Greene's most famous novel, although I think he wrote better. Not many, but a few (see previous paragraph). Moreover, his novels have been generally well adapted for the cinema and Brighton Rock has had a couple of pretty good films of it made. Sam Riley is good as Pinkie in the 2010 version, but I still think Richard Attenborough nailed it in 1947. Attenborough captures Pinkie's heartlessness and ambition. Yet neither version takes massive liberties with the text and I can recommend both. Read the book first.

And Another Thing... What Dickens Did to Annoy Me

I open this piece with an admission: The title is a thinly veiled conceit to allow me to discuss the limit to which a writer’s voice should intrude into their own writings. However, as I do have some minor gripes with Dickens, and to avoid being sanctioned under the Trades Description Act, I will deal with him first.

As I suspect that to some the mere idea of criticising Dickens is like committing literary regicide, let me first say that ‘A Christmas Carol’ is narratively perfect (as evidenced by how little the various recorded adaptations tend to vary from the source text). The beef I have with Dickens is the way he intrudes into his own stories with such monotonous regularity. To my mind for a ‘reader’ to be invested in a story, whether literary or theatrical, a certain suspension of disbelief is required for the duration. Dickens breaks the flow all too often, stopping to offer commentary on his own plot, as if he doesn’t trust his own narrative powers, only serving to remind you that what you’re reading is fiction. And while his comments are occasionally amusing, as when in ‘Oliver Twist’ he says with biting sarcasm, “What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England! They let their paupers sleep!” mostly I find it annoying.

Now, it may be that Dickens did this to appeal to his younger readers, but Philip Pullman manages not to be so patronising, so what’s stopping Dickens? The one thing he does do exceptionally well though is endings. ‘A Tales of Two Cities’, ‘Hard Times’, even ‘David Copperfield’, all are brought brilliantly to their conclusions. It’s just a shame that the reader is required to trudge through pages of turgid, staccato text to reach them. Give me Twain, Zola, or Dostoyevsky any day.

The only place where the author’s voice should be allowed to interfere is through a first person narrative. This is the choice which faces the writer, first person opinion versus third person omnipotence. Going to a concert, you accept a reduction in sound quality as the cost of seeing your music gods perform live. And with writing, the first person perspective is the sacrifice one is required to make to earn the right to express a subjective view. Either hover over a scene, narrating, but offering no opinion above a sub-textual level, or pick a character and get in the game. I would be here all day if I attempted to list every great first person novel, but ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’, ‘Moby Dick’. ‘The Secret History’ and ‘Dracula’ are a random selection of the best. In ‘Frankenstein’ we have Captain Walton writing to his sister, telling her the story Victor Frankenstein had told to him, which at one point includes the monster’s tale as told to Frankenstein by the monster. Here we are at the limits of the first person perspective, for additional suspension of disbelief is required to accept the story was not modified in the retelling through second hand, even third hand accounts. For Mary Shelley it works, as it would not for less skilled narrators. Again, this is the decision which confronts the author.

George Orwell, near the end of his life, offered his take on the pros and cons of writing in the first person. Briefly, he states the pros to be that you can get a novel stated quickly and the reader is liable to believe anything told them by the ‘I’, as a narrator lends credibility. But the author is never really separate from the narrator, who ends up a three dimensional character in a world of 1d shadows. Moreover, as the tale is told from one person’s perspective, character’s end up being far more publically candid than they would be in real life. Finally, “there are many kinds of appeal that you can make on behalf of others, but not for yourself.¹" In Orwell’s view, the pros are outweighed by the cons. Perhaps that’s why he only wrote one of his novels in the first person.

In defence of the first person perspective, I would have to point to any of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. Marlowe is certainly their most three dimensional character, but then Marlowe would seem alive, vivid and vital in most any novel. The same can be said of the Sherlock Holmes stories, all but a handful of which are told from the point of view Dr Watson. The plots are mostly ludicrous, the clues on which Holmes solves cases bearing little relation to reality (see, ‘The Speckled Band’). Yet they are also highly enjoyable. Most detective tales are told from one particular point of view to lend the story a sense of mystery. Where is the mystery when the narrator has third person omnipotence? Readers of thrillers fancy to pit their wits against the story’s great detective. That thrill is lessoned where there is even a suggestion that the narrator knows (has always known) the solution. Which is of course is true of all fictional works. It just doesn’t do to remind the mystery reader.

As with Marlowe, so with ‘Jane Eyre’, or ‘Dracula’ (with its multiple first persons), while the other characters may not seem as vivid as the narrator(s), isn’t this a closer approximation of life? How many people are there in our lives that we have known for years, whole lifetimes even, yet still know little about? In the real world there are no omnipotent world views, even someone who believes in a higher power cannot claim to have seen from that lofty height. Kierkegaard believed that the only truly objective being was God: As He is omnipresent, so He is infinitely subjective, seeing from all perspectives. By this reasoning, tales told in the omniscient third person are a sham.

And I’m not having a go at Orwell. I admire the man greatly. Yet he wasn’t literature’s greatest novelist. As with Dostoyevsky and ‘Crime and Punishment’, read ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ first, just to get it out of the way, safe in the knowledge that there are greater riches which await you. I have eulogised ‘Animal Farm’ in a previous essay, but it is with his non-fiction that Orwell outshines all other writers. ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, ‘Homage to Catalonia’, as well as his collected essays, these are the jewels in the Orwellian cannon. In non-fiction not to express a transparently subjective view is to be treated instantly with suspicion. George Orwell can never be accused of that. He was a man passionate in his beliefs and this passion pours from every journalistic passage he wrote. You don’t need to agree with every word (that would signify a lack of understanding), but you can admire the conviction with which he lived his life. Indeed, it is an ideal to which we would all do well to aspire.

I trust writers like Orwell, Naomi Klein and Chomsky, not because they are regarded as ‘left-wing’, but because they start out by letting you know that they are subjective creatures and from thence comes their passion. I don’t trust Fox News because it scans as ‘Fair and Accurate Reporting’, yet watch it for thirty seconds (laughing hysterically or merely agog, both work equally well) and you can draw your own conclusions. As Gutman says in that greatest of all third person novels, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, “I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not.” As with all Murdoch ‘media’, only one person’s opinion is ever trumpeted. And yet it is usually Sun journalists that attack the likes of John Pilger for the personal style of their journalism, as if there’s is any other kind. Subjectivity is always preferable to being merely a subject.

A novel is a facade with which to tell a tale, the skilled writer can express a dozen different opinions and still not reveal his own. No such construct exists in non-fiction, even in the retelling of historical events. As Howard Zinn notes, history is an infinite series of events and to tell any historical account one must select from those events. That selection is always subjective (As Zinn says, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”) and anyone who claims objectively in this field should be asked to come back when they have a more honest reply. Historians are one of the most trenchantly subjective of all the professions, who obstinately insist on their own objectively, effectively rendering mainstream history stagnant (see for instance the received historical wisdom that because Hitler was evil, that gives carte blanche to absolve the allies of all their crimes). Such people, to paraphrase Gutman, are asses and asses that are “going contrary to the laws of nature.”

To conclude, I do actually like writing in the third person, I also like writing in the second person, they each have their particular uses. In ‘Modern Fable’ I used the third person together with a lack of inner voice to remove any sense of inner monologue for the fascists. In my series of letters, Epistles to the Foxnewsians, the second person makes obvious sense. I just believe in treating each voice with a little more respect. But then this is non-fiction, so this is subjective (for I am passionate too), so this is my personal opinion. You may love the way Dickens writes, and good for you if you do. I guess what I’m saying is he’s not always to my personal tastes. And yet I know I want to read ‘The Pickwick Papers’. But as I warned you, the conceit was always thinly veiled. In the words of Johnny Rotten: “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” But as Elwood Blues so perfectly replied, “What do y'all want for nothing? A rubber biscuit?”