Conversing in the car

 

I took my now-retired English teacher from school at Uppingham, Gordon Braddy, on a day trip to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at Birmingham University.

 

We saw so many fine works there ‒ Botticelli, Veronese, van Dyck, Rubens, Poussin, Dahl (above*), Murillo, Gainsborough, Turner, Rossetti, Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Monet, van Gogh, Rodin, Gauguin, Derain, Magritte, Hodgkin… His first time there.

The journey was some two hours by car in each direction (including me losing my way in both directions, somewhere around Spaghetti Junction). We talked intimately and continuously.

At one point, Gordon remarked how good such journeys are in promoting rich conversation… ‘much better than trains.’

I suppose the fact that driver and passenger sit so close to one another, but necessarily without eye contact, has a lot to do with that.  

*Johan Christian Dahl (1785-1857, Norwegian), ‘Mother and Child by the Sea’

A Talent for Happiness

My inspiring English teacher at Uppingham half a century ago, Gordon Braddy, has just published a book of his own short stories, written over the past five years. Although clearly fiction, each taps into aspects of his own life, rich with his particular voice.  

I was struck in the last of them, the powerful ‘Visions and Revisions’, by an observation made by a headmaster to a young teacher in a job interview: ‘I do hope you have a talent for happiness… Oh yes! It has been my experience that even the most gifted schoolmasters only achieve the really important things when they are happy.’

A talent for happiness. Such a simple concept. So elusive.

My sense is that it’s important in many walks of life.

Writing: one-two-three

In conversation with my old English teacher from school, Gordon Braddy, we agreed that there are usually three distinct steps in the process of writing:

1.      Getting the idea.

2.      Doing a first draft.

3.      Polishing.

Of course, the first of these usually happens in an instant. For me it’s important to make a note of the idea at that time. Otherwise I sometimes have to wait weeks or even months for it to surface again.

The second is the hardest, the most daunting. Is the idea any good? What shape will it take?

The third is the one that occupies the most time. Endlessly improving communication and style. In fact, it can be a never-ending process, so at some stage it’s important to call a truce.

The Real King Lear

I notice that Tom Stoppard has spoken recently of the late John Wood as “truly my favourite actor”.

I first saw him in the debut production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Old Vic in the 1960s. Then, brilliantly, in Travesties, which was written by Stoppard for him.

But for me he was the indelible Lear.

I had first seen King Lear as a teenager at school, directed by the extraordinary Gordon Braddy and starring David Allister (then David MacDonald). But I was far too immature to get it then (as I do so personally now).

So when I became involved with Sam Wanamaker and Shakespeare’s Globe, I made up for lost time, seeing a dozen or more different Lears in eighteen months, many of them our most celebrated actors. It was John Wood at the RSC in 1990 that seemed to me to be Lear.

He died aged 81 a year ago this month. A great actor, but no celeb.

The teacher who changed my life

A few years ago I gave a talk in London on “100 Years of Macbeth Recordings”, Verdi that is.

The audience for the talk, mainly gents (and a few ladies) older than me, and very expert in the history of recordings and opera and singers, were not to be impressed by my knowledge of (and insights regarding) Verdi. But they understood pretty quickly that I had a good grasp of the play and of how Verdi had gone about reshaping and compressing it for the lyric stage.

It was only later that I realised that my love of Macbeth started much earlier, with GS Braddy’s production at Uppingham School in 1957. Not having any performing role in that, I studied the text privately, and knew it well by the time of the performances. I was thirteen.

Later I had the good luck to be in Gordon Braddy’s English literature class. We studied Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V. I can’t think that Braddy himself can have been very inspired by Saint Joan. (I certainly was left with no great love for Shaw’s wordy pontifications.) But Henry V stays with me, illuminated by that inspiring man. And Shakespeare since those days has been a constant presence in my life.

Many of his pupils have referred to Braddy’s treatment of boys as his equals. I feel sure that this was an illusion, but one which is at the heart of so much great teaching.

One day, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which Braddy read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

In due course I escaped from the cloistered, for me repressive, world of Uppingham. The piece I took with me was Gordon Braddy.

Does everyone have such an influence in their life?

(Above: Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, photo by Angus McBean.)

Looking for Lawrence

“A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour…”

Even with my predilection for things Australian, I’d never read DH Lawrence’s Kangaroo. That is until my English teacher from school half a century ago, Gordon Braddy, recently recommended I give it a go.

Not the most taut (or taught) of Lawrence’s work – he never seems to have got around to editing it – I loved it. Rich in observation of 1920s New South Wales, and in particular a somewhat bonkers far-right clique he encountered there, it has swiftly become my favourite Australian novel.

So, on our recent visit, we went in search of the house where Lawrence lived and wrote much of the novel – in Thirroul, a small town on the coast south of Sydney.

I stopped and asked a woman in a pharmacy there if she knew where the house might be? “Why, yes,” she said, and gave me precise directions. “Does everyone in Thirroul know where it is?” I enquired. “No,” she smiled, “but I do.”

Craig Street is a quiet road leading up to the ocean, lined with recently built bungalows, amongst which is just one remaining example from the pre-war period - Lawrence’s “Wyewurk”. It looks as though it’s virtually untouched.

"There it crouched, with its long windows and its wide verandah and its various slopes of low, red-tiled roofs. Perfect! Perfect! The sun had gone down behind the great front of black mountain wall which she could still see over the hedge. The house inside was dark, with its deep verandahs like dark eyelids half closed. Somebody switched on a light. Long cottage windows, and a white ceiling with narrow dark beams... How the sea thundered!" (Kangaroo, chapter 5)

Completely unmarked and unsuspected. Exciting to find.