Artistic heist, Walter Benjamin steals from Paul Klee, wireless grabs at Ravel - shock horror

On a rainy day in Manchester, last week, (August 2010) my partner showed me a copy of Angelus Novus, a picture by the artist Paul Klee. She had just read me an account of it by the German Philosopher, Walter Benjamin, in which he describes it as being of a figure rushing backwards into the future while witnessing the inevitable trail of utter devastation left behind - like being dragged through a hedge backward, I thought, and seeing a trail of broken twigs and torn leaves, but on a cosmic scale. It seems that Benjamin felt so convinced by his own reading of the picture that he felt he had the right to re-name it as The Angel of History. W.G Sebald refers to Benjamin’s account at the end of his second Zurich lecture in the volume On the Natural History of Destruction.

Although I knew something of Klee’s fragile work, I expected nonetheless to see a work of art as powerful as Benjamin’s description. Even so, I was surprised by Klee’s delicate, formalised image. Decked out in dots, dashes and all washed over in tired Champagne it remained firmly within the artist’s deceptively childlike, and gossamer creations. In taking his tremulous lines for little walks over the paper, he has given me a nimble depiction of a slightly tipsy flapper. She wears a lion’s mask and is decked out in a costume of a fabulous bird stepping out on the tiles doing the Charleston. What looks to be the mane, a masculine attribute, reminds me how, before the introduction of spongy rubber rollers, women used twisted pieces of paper to give shape to their hair while they slept. Her left eye looks straight out of the picture at me, but the right slews off centre further to the right, and tells of her having consumed too much of that Champagne.

Certainly it is possible to see it as being a symbol of a need to escape the memories of the carnage of World War I. But then I can see everything from that period as a messenger from that era. And this for me is a good thing, because it helps to diminish Benjamin’s take over of this single febrile image.

In general terms, my thoughts on this began with my first memory of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro For Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet. This was when I was in my teens. As an accompaniment to a dramatic adaptation for radio of A. V. Morton’s retelling of the story of Jesus, In the Steps of the Master, it could hardly have been bettered. But for a long time after the music was spoilt for me by it having been reduced to a mere trigger to the memory of the radio play, which though good, was definitely the lesser of the two art forms. Today, by describing how I see Klee’s picture, I am trying to claim it back on behalf of the rest of us who want to look at it afresh and not as Benjamin would have us believe it to be. As with any picture it can be seen in as many ways as there are viewers to view it.

hamlet, gertrude and my book

Re: the BBC News this morning: a question in a school exam has raised some dust. My anwer to it would be that of course Prince Hamlet is more concerned for his mother than himself. Anyone with an ounce of history in their blood can understand that.  There's a hint at why this should be in my novella, William Shakespeare - Dark Phoenix. I apologise for not yet having it up on line.  I am still mulling over various quesions, such as, should I put it up for a fee, or for free, or for a donation, and should I give it a web page to itself? I hope, like Hamlet, to have made up my mind very soon.  I have retreated from finding an agent or a publisher.  It is too dispiriting waiting for replies that never arrive.  Besides, in this these hard time I can understand that there's too much risk investing in a story that could never be a blockbuster.  When all is said, it is too short, being only 52000 words long, and is about a bunch of fusty old actors getting their hose into a twist over the death of an eleven year old boy.

But I can say with confidence that is better written than anything I have yet put into this blog because my partner, a one time copy editor, has ensured that it is so. 

Once on tour, I had to whisper to my wife, Marianne, (1930-84) on stage, not to look up because the curtain above us was smouldering having come into contact with a bare electric wire - it is essential not to frighten the audience into panic  - hence my silly cartoon

Judge, The New Prometheus - find in pages to the left of my blog

My monologue ‘Judge’ (originally entitled ‘The New Prometheus’) was commissioned as a contribution to the Conference ‘Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Child Abuse’ at the City University of New York, Brooklyn, USA. It had its premiere on Friday, 24 April 1987.

The second performance was given before an invited audience of psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors at The Friends Meeting House, Cambridge, UK on Saturday 26 September 1987.

It was given its third performance before an invited audience at the former Supreme Army Headquarters in the Stauffenbergstrasse, West Berlin on Sunday 3 January 1988.  It took place in the building in which the Hitler bomb plot executions of 1944 had been carried out, which now houses the Museum to the German Resistance.