The Undocumented Mark Steyn (19 page)

“That’s right,” he says.

Er, just remind me: what was the neo-Brechtian line again?” Like most of the audience, I find the Brechtian line less easy to recall than the line about “Aperitif?” “No, thanks, I’ve brought my own
.

“Well, it’s all sorts of notions about class, British imperialism. . . .” He recalls how he’d been very taken by some prince interviewed by Robert Lacey on a TV series about European aristocracy, and how he’d wanted to raise the subject of ancestor worship, which is what gave the prince an advantage over a fellow like himself, who could only trace his family one-and-a-half generations back to somewhere in Mitteleuropa, and how he carefully selected the ancestors of the Cockney earl to represent different stages in imperial history since the twelfth century. . . . “And out of that sprang the number ‘Men of Hareford,’ where the ancestors come out of their paintings and start tapping. . . .”

But it’s the tapping you remember. . . .

“Yes, but I think it was Hal—” (Ockrent is one of the few Britons who can plausibly first-name drop Hal Prince, director of
Cabaret
) “—or maybe it was Steve—” (And Stephen Sondheim, composer of
Sweeney Todd
) “—who said whenever you’re working on a musical that appears to be light and fluffy, it’s crucial to have a really important thought that underpins the thing. It’s not just Fred meets Sally, Sally loses Fred, then they get together. That isn’t enough today. That’s the big difference between what we’re doing in the Nineties and the way it used to be. We’ve all come out of university. . . .”

So it’s just to salve your conscience?

“Well, the people working on it have to get some satisfaction. And, in the end, it isn’t satisfying to whip up a soufflé if you haven’t cooked the venison just before it.”

In the old non-red-meat days of 1930
, Girl Crazy
was about a Jewish cabbie who goes west and becomes a mayor, or maybe it was a Jewish mayor who goes west and becomes a cabbie. Venison-wise, what’s
Crazy for You
about?

“Well, the venison is about cultural renewal. The soufflé is ‘Let’s put on a show, let’s do up the theatre, and everybody lives happily ever after.’ But the meat of it is that this is a town, Deadrock, that has died; the culture is dead; everybody’s asleep, nobody does anything. Then in comes this guy with enormous energy who wants to be a dancer, who wants to have rhythm, and he enthuses this town with a whole new life: he gives them rhythm, he gives them their culture back.”

So it’s a metaphor for the state of American showbiz?

Ockrent looks at me scornfully: I’d mistaken his haunch of venison for a soggy quarter-pounder. “It’s a metaphor for the state the world is in. Look at us here: we’re cutting back on our grants and our subsidies, we never believe culture is important, we never support it, and, if you don’t have a culture, you have no life. . . .”

So this glossy sappy-happy song’n’dance bonanza is, in fact, an argument for increased state subsidy of the arts?

“Absolutely. Philip Hedley of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East,
¹
would be happy with it.”

As it happens,
Crazy for You
is the first of Ockrent’s hits not to originate in the subsidized theatre, while his productions for commercial managements have proved considerably less commercial:
Look! Look!
was a short-lived play about the audience that never found one of its own;
Follies
was a textbook definition of a
succès d’estime
—a success that runs out of steam. “
Follies
said a lot about marriage and hopes dashed, and that’s an important topic. But if it’s something called
Follies
at the Shaftesbury, you expect to see a traditional follies. If it had been called
Middle-Aged Spread
. . . .”

You’d expect Ray Cooney?

“Okay,
Middle-Aged Dread
. But the point is you’d know not to take Gran’ma for an undemanding night out.”

He doesn’t accept the easy prècis of his career, as a division between splashy hits and more ambitious but less lucrative works. There are, he reckons, just as many important intellectual threads running through
Crazy for You
. Moreover, his approach to this show is no different from his early productions at the Traverse in Edinburgh, when he was heavily influenced by Peter Stein of Berlin’s Schaubühne Theatre and worried, in his dramaturge C. P. Taylor’s phrase, about “the paucity of modern philosophy.”

Today, there’s no paucity of philosophy about Ockrent. Indeed, whenever you enquire about a specific lyric or even a throwaway joke, he inevitably expands it into a discussion on geopolitical socioeconomic trends post-Thatcher. In his novel,
The Independent
’s musical theatre loser-schmucko plans his suicide while listening to Streisand singing Sondheim: “Jesus, I love musicals!” he moans. Ockrent loves ’em, too, but, a physicist by training, he needs to know why.

“I do love Broadway, it’s consummately professional, it’s enthusiastic. When you cast the chorus here, you say, ‘We’d love you to be in the show,’ and
they nod quietly and go, ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘We’re going to start rehearsals on September 21st.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘So we’ll see you then.’ ‘Okay.’ And off they go: all very cool, very English. You do the same thing in America and they go, ‘Wow! Yo!’ There’s no pretending that it doesn’t mean much. On
Crazy for You
here, we’ve been working on the accents and I’ve been trying to explain that it’s more than the accents: it’s the way sentences are structured, even the body language is different—you come
forward
to talk. We hate display, we believe children should be seen and not heard—and where’s it got us? It’s got us in the worst recession, we’re a third-rate power. . . .”

Like the fourteenth chorus of an Ockrent first-act finale, the sheer exuberance is infectious. “So what you’re saying,” I ask, “is that Britain wouldn’t be such a depraved hellhole if we all went around as if we were auditioning for a musical comedy on Broadway?”

But even Ockrent knows when you’ve gone too far.

“Er, no, Mark. I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. . . .”

1
    
The Theatre Royal, Stratford East, is an East End theatre run by the Theatre Workshop, whose productions include
Oh
,
What a Lovely War
and
A Taste of Honey
.

LOOK WHERE YOUR STORIES HAVE LANDED YOU

On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini took out a fatwa on a British subject for writing a novel. Here’s a near contemporary column, by way of illustrating how, at the time, I missed the bigger picture. Then again so did his defenders, who insisted on presenting this affair as one that “raised questions” about “the role of literature in society.” Phooey. It was a would-be Sharia mob hit in the cause of Islamic imperialism, and perhaps, if we’d understood it as that, we wouldn’t have seen so many others in the decades since. I’ve warmed up to Sir Salman over the years, and I’m not sure I’d write this piece this way if I were doing it today. But he’s changed too, from the Rushdie of the 1980s—reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line—a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged—goes tenfold for him. He’s not just a liberal mugged by reality; he’s a liberal whom reality has spent a quarter-century trying to kill. I still have difficulties with his novels, not least the one that got him into all the trouble, but in his columns and essays he has outgrown his illusions. Anyway, here’s my thoughts on Rushdie’s first major post-fatwa interview, in October 1990 from
The Independent,
followed by the author’s response:

The Independent
, October 1, 1990

A FEW YEARS
back, on the street in New York, I was stopped by an opinion pollster and asked who I wanted to win the Iran-Iraq War:

(a) Iran

(b) Iraq

(c) Neither of the above

I plumped for (c). Like most people (I suspect), I feel pretty much the same way about “the Rushdie affair.” Despite Norman Tebbit’s
¹
best efforts, the novelist is no villain. But nor is he, as Harold Pinter,
²
Fay Weldon,
³
and Co. would have us believe, any kind of hero. On
The Late Show
last year, Michael Ignatieff
⁴
flayed Geoffrey Howe
⁵
for saying on the World Service that he didn’t much care for
The Satanic Verses
. But Sir Geoffrey, if you study his remarks in full, got it absolutely right: Rushdie is entitled to the protection of the state not because he is a “great writer” but because he is a British subject. To append to the dispute any crusade about the right to free speech or the role of literature in society is ridiculous. Rushdie is only in his present predicament because literature—or at least the metropolitan English novel—has become so remote from society that it no longer has any role. To read the original reviews of the book, in which the offending passages went without comment, is to enter a sort of strange sunlit conservatory, comfortably insulated from the real world. Unfortunately for Rushdie, it was, alas, not perfectly insulated. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is one of the most illusory refuges there is: the mob’s reaction to an articulate man’s powers of persuasion has invariably been to kill him.

Last night, Rushdie enjoyed as close an approximation of his old Hampstead dining haunts as he’s likely to see for some time—in the form of a genial
conversation with Melvyn Bragg
⁶
on
The South Bank Show
. The author’s choice of interrogator for his first TV appearance and its timing—to coincide with the publication of his new book—was presumably a deliberate strategy by Rushdie to show that it was business as usual: just another author on the plug circuit. But instead it had the effect of reminding you that the world of English letters is far too trivial to be at the eye of such a great socio-historical geo-political storm. Even a man with as inexhaustible a taste for blood as the Ayatollah Khomeini should have understood that.

In his own way, Rushdie came close to admitting as much: “You know the old Chinese curse which says, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, here I am—living in interesting times. Writers shouldn’t have lives this interesting. It gets in the way of your work.” There was a wry chuckle after this—one of several self-deprecating mannerisms the author seems to have acquired in hiding—but there was no doubt that he meant it. It was an understandable plea just to be left to get on with it. Yet it was at odds with everything he, Bragg, Harold Pinter, Lady Antonia Fraser, and the other members of the 20th June Group of writers
⁷
have been peddling for years—that the artist is an important figure in society whose views on politics and the wider world we ought to pay attention to. It is the theory which has underpinned broadcasting in this country for years: a successful businessman’s views on anything are unlikely to be sought by TV producers unless his factory closes, but if you’ve been nominated for the Booker Prize you’re apparently qualified to go on BBC2 and twitter on about Eastern Europe and the Gulf Crisis (Fay Weldon on
The Talk Show with Clive James
was the apotheosis of this philosophy). The notion that literature should be left alone to be literature recurred throughout the program and was, if not an absolute admission of defeat, the most telling indicator of Rushdie’s despair.

“I feel very sad for my book,” he said quietly. “All these other languages, whether they’re political or religious or sociological or whatever, have been
used to talk about what is after all a work which doesn’t respond to being talked about in those languages—I mean, not just my novel, any novel. . . .” Not surprisingly, his new book is “at one level about what is the nature of fiction.” “Look where stories have landed you now,” says one of the characters. “You’d have done better to keep your feet on the ground, but you had your head in the air.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to have expected Bragg to press Rushdie on some of these points. After all, for someone who’s endured what he has, it must have been enormously therapeutic and reassuring to be swaddled once again in the snug parameters of arts criticism. “After your first book,” began Melvyn, “which was not particularly well-received. . . .”

At such points, the gentility of the encounter took on a surreal quality. If only Rushdie could return once more to a world where he had no more to fear than not being particularly well-received. Chubbier and erubescent, his physical appearance could almost be some sort of political metaphor: the sinister Bombay exotic atop Mr. Tebbit’s diatribe in
The Independent Magazine
appeared to have metamorphosed into an amiable Julian Critchley type.
⁸
Only those unnerving eyes gave him away—more heavily hooded than ever before, rolled upwards with the upper half of the irises permanently invisible. It was like watching some sort of intermediate stage between life and death.