​Going Viral
I’m busy at work on my latest audio book which is the life of Edward Upward by Peter Stansky. Upward was ‘the fourth man’ in the literary grouping of WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. He is in the literary shadows, but in the 1930s he was a massive influence on all the writers above and the decade itself.
He tends to be a somewhat overlooked now, but Stansky’s biography goes some way to restoring his reputation a little. His personality and writings were split between ‘Art and Life’ (the subtitle of the biography) that is, between his writing and his political life. Like George Orwell, he felt that given the politics of his era he had to be political though he never much enjoyed this activity. For his generation being political meant joining the Communist Party.
However, he was always conflicted because his imaginative, artistic self was drawn to writing a brand of surrealism or fantasy. With Christopher Isherwood, his life-long friend, he created ‘The Mortmere Stories’ which is what (along with his political and autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent’) he is now most remembered for.
Stansky wrote a biography of Orwell years ago, which I read and very much enjoyed, so it was rather a thrill to be given the job of transferring this new biography, from the Enitharmon Press, into an audiobook.
In this era of the rise of the right in Europe and America, it’s good to be reminded of the values of the left and how essential the notion of fraternity, equality and community is over the I-generation’s focus on ‘me’ and ‘my rights’. Rights, in a sense, do need to be earned or at a minimum appreciated not as God-given, but as a human creation and one that needs to be fought for and then maintained. People have, and do, die to preserve these central values of decency to others, economic equality and justice.
Mobile phones and Facebook are a supplement to society, but true communion is made between human beings speaking and debating face to face. It is much harder to insult someone face to face, for various reasons: you can see the hurt you inflict, your own morality can be questioned because it’s not protected by anonymity, the reactions of your community can temper your disregard for others. etc. Of course, face to face contact can bring conflict too; it’s just that digital communication is more susceptible to certain abuses and can go much wider, much quicker. There’s a small clue in the phrase ‘going viral’, a few viruses do bring benefits, but most do not.  As is becoming recognized, we need to be wary of technology dictating human actions rather than the reverse. I heard one teenager, on Radio Four recently, who banned her friends using their mobile phones whilst they were visiting her. It is a classic scenario these days to see a group of friends together, no-one is talking, and everyone is on their mobile! There are more important issues, but our technological attributes are symptoms of greater ills.

Two Audio books out this week, both written by Max Ehrmann and narrated by myself. ‘Lifting the Veil’ originally appeared in the Harvard Graduates Magazine in 1927, and was this American writer’s longest prose inquiry into the nature of existence. He was a spiritual man, a poet and playwright, who never lost his love for nature, the night sky and long walks. His poetry always brings us back to the magnificence and beauty below the surface or behind the veil. In the title essay of this collection which I put together earlier this year, Ehrmann rejects the metaphysical tomes of Kant and Schopenhauer and returns to what he conceives as the more fundamental experience which accepts science straightforwardly but feels there is more to existence. His view is similar to that of Emerson and Thoreau full of pragmatism but with a vein of what is almost paganism or pantheism. Science engages the intellect, nature inflames the emotions, burns at the edges of the veil of Maya. The book also includes other essays by Ehrmann and biographical sketches of him by literary critics and people in his circle.
‘Worldly Wisdom Revisited: The Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach’ is his version, in verse, of the book of Ecclesiastes from the Christian Bible. He lost his Christianity early but maintained a respect for some of the wisdom Jesus. I wrote a long introduction to the book and it’s part of a long term plan to write a biography of this author. If you want a taste of his work take a look at ‘Desidarata’ his most famous poem which is all about taking life calmly and appreciating what you have and what there is out there if you have the eyes to see.

I texted the thought below to a friend of mine recently who’d said he sometimes found poetry impenetrable. It’s half-way to being a tweet but as I don’t tweet I thought I’d post it here. It was off the cuff but I liked it so I’m preserving it perhaps to be worked on later.
‘Poetry is the broadest class of writing, has the most forms and is the most individual and personal, along with being the most formal and artificial too. Prose fiction generally is sequential and narrative driven even when its experimental it tends to have a contextual narrative, simply put it tells a story, poetry is feelings attached to words.
So you are like most readers (myself included) more inclined to find prose, fact and fiction, easier than poetry which is often both fact and fiction at the same time!’
I composed a bit of doggerel for my friend on the day of the recent royal wedding too, as I juggled feeding my two girls at the leisure centre after swimming. He said as he’d requested them (he was at work and wanted some entertainment, and read them out to his colleagues as I sent them) they were commissions. So as they are commissioned work I thought I’d preserve them too! I think I’ll call them my ‘Anti-royal Dogs’:
First Dog:
‘Markle and His Majesty are getting wed,
That’s what the papers and tv endlessly said,
I missed it, dreaming they’d gone forever,
And of their kind I’d have to hear again, never!’
 
The office crowd gave a ‘mixed response’ and asked for something that rhymed with ‘parasite’
Second Dog:
‘The Royals are the greatest parasite,
Sucking our blood out morning ‘til night,
Wish I could squash them flat,
I’d be happy for the papers to report that!’
 
There was a short interval whilst I took both my girls to the loo, then
Third Dog:
‘If you are a parasite given wings of old
Just remember who gave you gold,
One day again instead of a wedding ring,
We’ll do that old Cromwell thing,
Take those wings and bind them tight,
Make who you call ‘insects’ feel the might
You have had all your life,
Not god given but taken with the knife
And sword of ages past,
May your blood-sucking reign not last!’
 
Sure they don’t quite scan but I was juggling children whilst composing and texting which was good for the parental mind! 

The audiobook of 'Lifting the Veil' is complete and coming out in the next couple of weeks which I'm happy about and as I mentioned in the last blog 'Worldly Wisdom Revisted' a book by and about Max Ehrmann which I've edited is close to coming out too. I'm pleased with the introduction which is 15 or so pages and being worked over by Sarah my wife right now.
The book is completed really I'm just doing some final adjustments, I changed the size formatt which slowed things down a little but this is all part of a master plan to edit a whole raft of books on Ehrmann before I publish a biography. The biography will take a few years I expect but all the books inbetween I'm going to form part of a fascinating and enjoyable journey I think. 
The cover blurb for Worldly is as follows:
This is a fully revised version of Max Ehrmann’s 1934 classic ‘Worldly Wisdom’. Ehrmann’s famous poem ’Desiderata’ has delighted the world for many years and is one of the most popularly searched poems on the internet. Like ‘Desiderata’ this new book is full of gentle soulful advice on how to lead one’s life. A detailed introductory essay, by Tim Dalgleish, investigates Ehrmann’s relationships with Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Debs and others, and is full of interesting biographical facts about the author himself, all of which helps us ‘revisit’ this spiritual classic with fresh eyes.

My latest book which I've edited and written an introduction to is 'Lifting the Veil: Beloved Dead, Biography and other appreciations' is now available on Amazon. This is a collection of writings by and about Max Ehrmann an American poet who I'm writing a biography of at present. He is famous for his poem 'Desiderata' which is included in this volume but the title essay is a spiritual investigation into the nature of reality! Biography is a new territory for me and so far I'm finding it fascinating. I'm planning a series of books that include material by Ehrmann which will be edited and introduced by me. The cover of the next book, which will follow hot on the heels of Lifting the Veil, is below!

​Because I’ve been working on several projects connected to Max Ehrmann, I have found very little time to write a blog recently. So, in lieu of a piece written especially for the Farthingstone Chronicles, I’ve attached below, a part of the introduction to my new book, Lifting the Veil, Beloved Dead and other appreciations. This is a collection of writings on and by Max Ehrmann, an American poet known mostly for his poem Desiderata. The book will be out in the next week or two:
In researching the materials for this book, I decided to look through the archives of that venerable literary publication The New York Review of Books. I assumed, there would be a few articles on this author, who in his time was the friend, acquaintance or correspondent of the likes of Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis, the novelist Jack London, Theodore Dreiser (author of the classic An American Tragedy), Eugene V. Debs (the union leader and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World or ‘Wobblies’), Havelock Ellis (the physician and social reformer who put sexuality on the map in the nineteen-thirties), Birth Control campaigner, Margaret Sanger, the radical editor and political activist, Max Eastman, Booth Tarkington, author of The Magnificent Ambersons and many other notable figures. However, Ehrmann’s stock has fallen so low in the literary world since his death in 1945, that to my surprise I could find nothing on him in The New York Review of Books (which was founded in 1963).
This apparent amnesia is curious but has happened before with Ehrmann. One Sunday during Lent in 1956, Reverend Frederick W. Kates, the rector of Old St Paul’s in Baltimore, placed on the pews, as was his habit, a poem. The poem, mimeographed onto sheets with the parish letterhead, was Desiderata. Perhaps because it was only a little over a decade since Ehrmann’s death and the rector assumed his congregation was familiar with the text, or simply because he relayed it in his sermon, either way, Reverend Kates failed to include the name of the poem’s author on the handout itself. The letterhead simply read ‘Old St. Paul’s Church, A.D., 1692’.
An alternative version of the story has it that Ehrmann’s name was omitted by a member of the congregation when passing it onto friends. Either way, copies of the poem slowly began to leach into the local community and eventually into the consciousness of the burgeoning youth movement, nascent, but growing across America at that time. Hippies, Flower Power and the ‘swinging’ sixties, saw the poem reproduced on posters and in underground magazines, misattributed, however, with the urban myth, ‘Anonymous, written in 1692, found on a plaque on the wall of Old St. Paul’s Church’ and so on.
Not until 1965, with the death of Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential candidate and US Ambassador to the United Nations, did the issue of authorship come to national prominence. Stevenson died in London, on July 14th, during a stop-over back from Switzerland. Soon after, a column by Betty Beale appeared in the Washington News and was syndicated nationally. In her column, she was objecting to a cover story in Time magazine, which had claimed that Stevenson was a lonely and gloomy figure. This Beale rejected, reporting that his close friends said otherwise. In support of her argument, she wrote,
‘When he took off for Geneva [shortly before his death] he left behind on the bedside table in his New York apartment a printed page that he had marked. Perhaps it was intended for a commencement address [others have said he intended to use it in his Christmas cards that year]. He did not write it but that he chose it and saved it for his attention upon his return is indicative of his own thought. It was entitled Desiderata, and it was originally found in Old St. Paul’s church, Baltimore, dated 1692.’
In her next column Beale corrected the error and named Ehrmann as the poem’s author but perhaps unsurprisingly, in some quarters, the ‘Anonymous’ authorship of this piece of supposed 17th Century Americana continued being promulgated. Indeed, 1968 saw Star Treks’ Leonard Nimoy release an LP with his rendition of the poem included but re-titled Spock’s Thoughts. Not to be outdone, in 1970, Bonanza’s Lorne Greene read it on the Johnny Cash Show, as did Joan Crawford, in the same year, on David Frost’s TV show. Then in 1971, Les Crane, a former talk show host, recorded the poem. Crane was accompanied by a musical arrangement from Fred Werner which included a gospel choir and harpsichord. This reached number 8 on the Billboard charts and went on to win a Grammy for Spoken Word Recording in 1972. In 1978 Richard Burton recorded it as part of a ‘personal anthology’ entitled The Hound of Heaven. Max Ehrmann’s name didn’t appear on any of these TV shows or recordings, and the verse was usually misattributed. A typically ironic example of attribution was the credit given on the Les Crane LP, which read, ‘Produced by Fred Werner and Les Crane for Old St. Paul Productions.’
In the age of the internet, Ehrmann is now generally credited with authorship of the poem, but he still remains a shadowy figure on the literary stage. Aside from Desiderata most of his work remains unknown. ‘Lifting the Veil’ is perhaps one of his most obscure pieces, but deserves to be better known, as it reveals much about the philosophy or weltanschauung of the man behind Desiderata.

​Last night I had the good fortune (well I bought a ticket) to see ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ at the Derngate in Northampton. This was its second night of a new UK tour. It’s been a phenomenally successful play, winning Olivier, Tony, Broadway and WhatsOnStage Awards for its director,  writers and stage designers.
Some months ago, I had finally caught up with the success of the show and had thought it would be good to get to see it sometime. It was, as I expected, an extremely well drilled, physical play, which makes it sound a bit stern, when in fact it is a hilarious farce. Those words ‘hilarious farce’ are the kind of trope repeatedly attached to any comedy that’s successful in the West End and Broadway. In this case, the words could have been new minted.
The premise, of an amateur play, a murder mystery (put on by the so called, Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society) which rapidly descends into an unintended farce, is not original (and immediately made me think of ‘The Art of Coarse Acting’ by Michael Green) but its strength lies in the execution of the physical action (including a very dynamic set, which is really a character itself) and the snappy, joyful humour of the script.
I enjoy farce but I haven’t been to see one in sometime and I’m not much in the habit (I admit rather shamefacedly being an actor myself) of going to the theatre. The reason I was sitting in the audience was not because of the excellent press the play has received but because I know the director, Mark Bell. I haven’t spoken to Mark for probably a couple of decades. I think I last saw him on stage, as an actor, with a company called Hoi Polloi maybe ten years ago and I haven’t kept up with his career much since.
I knew he had an good career, as an actor and director, always making good work and drawing strongly on his own training (at the very prestigious École Internationale de Theâtre, Jacques Lecoq), and that he himself had also taught, at the well know acting school, LAMDA. His was a successful career, full, I’m sure, of half a lifetime’s pleasure, hardwork and satisfaction at work well done in the world of theatre. But ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ and his association with Mischief Theatre has been, as he himself says ‘a life changer’ catapulting him into what could seem like another career.
Of course it isn’t, it’s the same career, the same job, the same art, that he’s been working on, and making stronger, for decades. This ‘overnight success’ is, like so many similar stories, based on years of hard graft and dedication. The best thing that such success brings, I imagine, is a sense of validation of one’s efforts. Naturally, throughout his career, because he’s excellent at what he does, Mark has received compliments from colleagues in the trade and from audience members. That is good and helps and validates one’s work. But nonetheless, it’s good for your friends (if nothing else) to see someone they know, being given praise and awards and kudos for their excellence.
I said above that ‘I haven’t spoken to Mark for probably a couple of decades’, that was, up until last night. So, when I bumped into him (and his AD Sean Turner) in the foyer, during the interval, I was especially pleased. The show has been around since 2014, has had half a dozen casts, at least, and is on not its first tour, so I really hadn’t expected him to be there. What was also nice was that, although I hadn’t seen him in a long time, he hadn’t changed all that much. He was perhaps a little gentler than I recall, as last time I saw him in a rehearsal room, he was probably shouting at me, in his Geordie accent, saying ‘That was shite, do it again!’ But apart from that, he was, if anything quite gracious, certainly friendly, to someone who was an acquaintance from many years ago.
I asked him a few questions, about his life and the show and the future but I really wished my good friend Caz Tricks was there, who knew Mark better than I back in the day. She is much more forthright and quicker witted than I and I would have enjoyed seeing her give old Biffa a hug and ask him properly how the hell he was. She, like I, probably even feels a bit of pride in Mark’s achievements. Which isn’t really warranted and perhaps pride is the wrong word but it is great just to see an old friend doing well for himself. I was asked recently if I felt jealous of Mark’s success and I have to say there are plenty of people that are doing as well as he is, if I wanted to indulge in feeling jealous (which is truly one of the stupidest emotions) I could just be jealous of them. As for Mark, I wish him continued, on-going and greater success.
He told me he was working on other plays and interesting projects which I’d expected. Well good luck to him. (Given Mark’s success, I was going to call this blog ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ but in the end decided that sounded too much like Mark was about to cop it, which was not my intention at all!)
It’s funny how projects can snowball and become bigger than planned. In fact, that’s one of the delights in the acting world. Success, on whatever level, often means you go further than expected, push your own limits and improve you craft and sometimes your life. In a related, tangential way, I was thinking the other day about nepotism in acting, and in the Arts in general, and concluded that, in fact, it’s very difficult and possibly counter-productive (in the same way that Soviet Art was counter-productive and in the end vacuous), to try and get rid of it. The reason being, that nepotism in the theatre world, is one way of insuring you work with people you work well with (often mates, friends or good work colleagues, at a minimum), people who read each other well and know how the other person operates. Time is not wasted, the machine turns over immediately.
Filmmakers especially, again and again, work with the same team. Sometimes this includes actors, sometimes not, but almost always a director or producer will choose to work with the same technical team behind the camera. There is room for ‘new blood’ and sometimes that’s vital but as illiberal as it sounds I think a bit of a dictatorial or nepotistic attitude in the arts is necessary. Just as the world would benefit from a benign dictator, so does a play! I don’t make this point overly seriously but human co-operation is vital to the art of acting, in both play and filmmaking, and that co-operation, counter-intuitively, often has to be co-opted and controlled by a good director.
When I was younger I used to think, the actor did all the work and a director, more or less, looked after the set and directed traffic. Now, I much more relate to Hitchcock’s statement that actors are cattle! The more experience you gain as an actor, the greater the respect you gain for directors, and the more you realise, that in theatre as much as in film, you need an auteur, an author with a single vision of what works and what doesn’t. The actor serves the story and the director, if they don’t, they may be impressive and smash a bit of china, like the proverbial bull, but their work will be bullshit in the end, it will stink of undigested ego-glory. 

  ​The question of identity for an actor doesn’t rise from the graveyard of dream until they have picked up the mask many times.
One morning they will get out of bed, breakfast, sit with a coffee, pull out a battered script to go over their lines. If they are some way along the road, the script is a prop, a crutch, more for comfort than necessity. If they have the words, have thought about the topography of the play, the motivations, the deviations of spirit they can take that are not upon the page (but round out the character, the mask they are making), then as they raise the teacup they may just pause.
What are they doing? ‘Why do we all love story some much?’ they think.
Every day we slaughter and devour more stories than we do cattle. Rarely in a digital, radio and televisual, computer hitched society, does a day pass in which the citizen doesn’t watch or listen to a narrative full of characters. Alternatively, we read the newspaper, magazine, periodical, book. We gossip. We hear the fragments of autobiography, from friends and strangers, fresh from the press of existence. Some are Dadaist in composition, broken, inchoate, violent in volume or intent, incomprehensible, mysterious, dull, some are full-bodied, full of the muscular arcs and bridges of narrative pathways integrated, formed, written, built, over months or years, amplified into imaginative alleys, streets, cities, planets, peopled, populated with humorous, happy, dark, tragic, ordinary, everyday, playful, archetypal and symbolic characters. All humanity, encompassed, portrayed, captured, nailed down, expanded, ridiculed by the actor, writer, artist, dancer, musician.
In the second, between lip and cup touching, the cosmos of what it is to play a part unzips in the actor’s head. Their past, the player of a hundred parts, spills. And they consider themselves.
Like a yogi, they contemplate the body. Their body. The body of steam rising with the cup in their hand, to their lips. The bodily content of ideas, thoughts, emotion contained within the machine, the body of flesh, the organic matter that they are.
Playing other people has always possessed them, intrigued and entertained them, felt natural. Their nature is to adopt the mask, create personas, figments, imagined creatures. Their nature is to play seriously; the comic parts are the most serious, the tragic playful.
Spend half a life being Jim Carrey and the character of Jim Carrey departs or you could say he arrives, to live the life for the person within or behind, the character of Jim Carrey. Carrey was the actor with a thousand inauthentic faces. He obtained everything he desired, wrote an imaginary cheque to himself, made himself a millionaire before he was a millionaire, was a film star before he was a film star, projected and became the projection, then found himself looking at the screen with the rest of the audience.
Now, Jim Carrey does not exist within a body; he is an idea in the world. The idea of Jim Carrey lives within the minds of millions, loved, hated, impressive and barely visible. He is a ghost, a digital reality, a whisper, a joke in an Italian hotel, as solid as air, as clear as smoke. Jim is now fond of saying ‘I’m not a guy experiencing the world. I’m the world experiencing a guy.’ Attaining everything transforms the content of the world, everything, into nothing. Having it all, one is pressed, crushed out, emptied, made devoid of desire for things, objects, ambitions, nothing holds, everything is released. Once one has exhibited characters, the face solidifies, the person, the will behind the facial muscles, slips out.
We are all the actor without a face, the mask. You and I separate ourselves by the desire for recognition by you and I. It is a chain of being, a genetic envelope, which makes of the division of self, the object and the subject, a letter. We send out letter after letter, but they are always returned undelivered. The cell we are within, continually splits. We are the sweaty little man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz, as Jim  Carrey is found of analogising. The bigger the actor, the bigger the fall, the heavier the realisation. I am you, and you are me, becomes a meaning that feels right, not a mantra for foreign bodies. You become part of a foreign legion, the detached, the damaged and the reforming, the deformed released from criminal practice, the practice of being a person, the art and the social discourse, are alienated.
In a poem, Berthold Brecht wrote that the mask of evil on his wall had veins in its temple, pulsing with effort, what a strain it is to be evil he said. But the effort is universal; it is the pain of evil which makes the veins stand out so much.  C.S.Lewis says somewhere in ‘Mere Christianity’ that the proto-Christian cannot begin on the path to enlightenment, cannot lose the burden of this life, until they recognise the guilt they have within. Only when you see that you are sick will you hear what the doctor is saying.
But our dis-ease is not of our making. It is circumstantial, existential. The Manichean may be right; there is no light without the dark. And we may be both dark and light. But neither is a chosen state. We are presented with masks to choose from, and we can choose which mask to wear, and this is a becoming, a choice, but the void of being is not a choice, a decision is not made to change it. The mask of sickness like all masks is an illusion, not a human fate.
Attainment of all one’s dreams, leaves one without dreams. The illusion and death of identity is lost and found in the graveyard of dream.

My latest book is actually a re-release of my first book with additional material but I was pleased with the cover and it was good to update the content. It will be available in 3-5 days!