BIGGER AND BETTER AT THE WEST YORKSHIRE PLAYHOUSE by Penny Dolan

Last month, I wrote about seeing Kneehigh Theatre’s production of "946: The Amazing Adventure of Adolphus Tips" at the Globe theatre, down on London's Southbank.

On that occasion I was sharing the experience with a couple of pre-teens.



This month, I saw the show again, with a wonderful "grown-up"  writing friend at a very different venue. the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

 When this building - also known as the "WYP" - opened in March 1990, under its Artistic Director Jude Kelly, it was Britain’s largest new purpose-built theatre for 15 years. It was built on Leed's Quarry Hill, the site of the most notorious slums in 19^th Century Western Europe, and later, of their replacement, the infamous Quarry Hill flats, which were also torn down. The WYP considers itself to be “a vital theatre, a great artistic beacon for the North, rooted in our communities and creating exceptional art,” and I am a great admirer of the place.

The WYP's largest stage, named the Quarry, offers a modern, wide-open acting space which is almost the opposite of the Globe's pillared Elizabethan apron stage. Immediately, the small Kneehigh cast had more room to move and “play”. There was no conflict between the setting and the use of acoustic music, sound effects, lighting or Kneehigh's trademark glitter ball. There was no problem over the “non-Shakespearean” nature of the 946 play, an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children's novel about the Slapton Sands disaster, which I've written about more expansively here. In  the Quarry, the dancers had room to dance, the musicians on the balcony were easily visible, and the shallow raked seating allowed easy movement from the stage into the audience. I really appreciated seeing the show working in this new “expanded” acting space.

Yet afterwards, musing on all that I’d seen, I felt that - compared with the seemingly smaller Globe - some of the scenes lost their intensity. In the Quarry, the tiniest puppet figures, so cleverly used in the production to change perspective and time, looked a little too tiny to have an impact on the back-rows, whether they were flock of sheep and sheep-dog, or the miniature German parachutist.

Additionally, when the cast hold up photographic portraits of the “German pilot’s family” and also those representing all the nationalities involved in “England’s War”, was the important and intentional variety of faces visible? The 750 seater Quarry is a space may be more suited to large scale projection than to hand held A4 sheets and display books. 

As the larger stage gave room and time to separate out the scenes, it sometimes created a slightly different mood. At the Quarry, when Lily, the young heroine, daydreams about Hitler and Churchill ending the war by means of children’s games, there were just the three actors spread across the front of the set. Yet, on the Globe’s crowded stage, the moment was and had to be set within the cheering, crowded schoolroom. There the scene came across as young Lily storytelling to amuse her young friends, all sharing in the same fantasy, wishes and war worries. Both the Kneehigh performances were good but it was interesting to see the way the two theatre spaces shaded their own versions.

I felt the audience at the Quarry seemed warmer and keener than the crowds at the Globe, who must surely have included people seeing the show as part of their London tourist’s “history” experience, despite the programme’s lack of the Bard. The Leeds audience seemed to be welcoming the show for its own sake, and there was the room for a well-deserved standing ovation without any concerns over the tightness of the seating or the creakiness of a wooden theatre frame. There was also time to notice the elderly woman in the row in front of me, sobbing for her own childhood memories. All I can say is that both sizes of theatre experience had their own strengths and delights.

Even though I’m half-repeating my last post, I’m putting these thoughts up as my History Girls post here today, because November – especially this particular November – seems to be all about “acts” in bigger or smaller settings: huge triumphs and desperate disappointments, and with emotions stirred by other kinds of actor.

Despite the “inclusive” messages within Michael Morpurgo’s books and shows, and similar books by other authors, I feel concerned that this concentration of war anniversaries and the remembrance of the dead has not opened hearts and minds as they might have done.


I worry that these “bigger” celebrations may have led to an uncomfortable, boastful kind of nationalism, have fed a public mood that runs from newsreaders being trolled for not wearing a poppy promptly enough through to knowingly-edited photographs of party leaders at the Cenotaph being used by the press for political ends. Although the lessons being learned from these bigger celebrations of past conflicts has informed some, and honoured the many sacrifices, I wonder whether they have also led to an uncomfortable  and illusory sense of “national greatness”.


I may be wrong in my pessimism but, this November, it fills me with sadness to know that I cannot see a St George’s flag nor Union Jack displayed without a certain kind of discomfort, despite all the sacrifices that my family has made in the past. In what is said to be a post-factual age, history is looming very large indeed. White poppies, rather than white feathers, perhaps.

Penny Dolan.
A Boy Called M.O.U.SE

Remembering...by Sue Purkiss

Seven years ago,  I went to a funeral in Wells. The cathedral was full, and I, like many others, watched on big screens outside on the green. Someone royal was there, and there were representatives from several European countries. It was all filmed and was later shown on the television news.

So whose funeral was it? That of a statesman or a politician? Or a famous actor, perhaps?

No, none of those. It was the funeral of an ordinary working man. No-one had heard of him until he was a hundred years old, when he finally broke his silence and began to speak about a war in which he had taken part as a young man: World War One. After that, he found fame as one of the last surviving Tommies; he travelled to France to take part in memorial services, he co-operated in the writing of a book about his life, he appeared in documentaries, speaking movingly about the pointlessness of war, he met the great and good. One by one, his contemporaries died, till finally he was the only one left: Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy. He died when he was 112. I've written about him before - you can see those posts here and here.

Harry Patch on the 

There are many ways through which we remember that war and others: through books, through film, through poetry. They all work, they all move us and make us think. But just over a year ago, I joined a choir. It's run by Issy Emeney, who not only writes and performs music, but is also a painter and a flatfoot/clog dancer. And she has written a song, called The Last Tommy, about Harry. Into just a few verses, she gets the pointlessness, the waste of war. The penultimate verse is sung as a solo, and every time I hear it, it catches me. You can listen to the song here, and I'm sure Issy won't mind me quoting that verse:

Look into an old man's eyes
And what do you see there?
Peace and reconciliation
For the wounds we all must bear:
There's hope in every sunrise,
Joy in every song I write;
But when England's very last Tommy died
I cried, I cried...
When the very last fighting Tommy died,
I cried.

And now to remember a musician and poet who died last week - Leonard Cohen. This is a reading he did recently of the famous poem written during the First World War by John Macrae, a Canadian doctor - so it's a sort of double remembering. Thanks to Alison Arlington for this, a friend who posted it on Facebook.

An interview with Arushi Raina, by Y S Lee

Arushi Raina's potent debut novel, When Morning Comes, is a coming-of-age story set in apartheid-era South Africa. Told by four alternating first-person narrators - an angry revolutionary, an ambitious gangster, a son of extreme privilege, and a peaceful activist - it sets the narrators' personal stories against the backdrop of the Soweto Uprising of 1976.



Here's the official description:

Zanele is skipping school and secretly plotting against the apartheid government. The police can't know. Her mother and sister can't know.

Her best friend Thabo, schoolboy turned gang member, can tell she's up to something. But he has troubles of his own—a deal gone wrong and some powerful enemies.

Across the bridge, in the wealthy white suburbs, Jack plans to spend his last days in Johannesburg burning miles on his beat-up Mustang—until he meets a girl with an unforgettable face from the simmering black township—Soweto.

Working in her father's shop, Meena finds a packet of banned pamphlets. They lead to a mysterious black girl with a secret, a dangerous gangster with an expensive taste in clothes, and an engaging white boy who drives a battered red car.

A series of chance meetings changes everything.

A chain of events is set in motion—a failed plot, a murdered teacher, and a secret movement of students that has spread across the township.

And the students will rise.

When Morning Comes is a striking achievement. With four very distinct narrators who are often hostile to each other, it would be easy for the novel's structure to fracture or spin out of control. Instead, it coheres. Raina's handling of race and politics is both subtle and consistent. And her prose is by turns vivid and moving, striking and restrained - precisely the vehicle such a story demands. After finishing it, the novel haunted me for days. I'm so glad that Raina kindly agreed to answer some of my more persistent questions here.

YSL: I really admire the way you tell the story through four interlocking narratives. Each voice is incredibly distinct, the characters are frequently at odds with each other, and yet the novel holds together – an impressive technical accomplishment! Why did you choose to structure it in this way?

AR: I’m tempted to say that the book wrote itself that way—it’s a story about collisions, the personal, day to day collisions the characters have with eachother, against a backdrop of the larger collision of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. I needed to go to different parts of the city, to see things differently, to create the underlying tension in the story. But the truth is, I’ve been playing with different points of views for a while, I love how Zanele, Thabo, Jack and Meena all tell the story differently, and how the writer (me) and the reader has to come to terms with which, if any version they most relate to.

YSL: You were born in South Africa, but long after the novel’s action takes place. What inspired you to write about your earliest homeland and what kind of research did you do to establish a sense of time and place?

AR: For the longest time, I didn’t write about South Africa, partly because I didn’t feel I was able to, and partly because to write about home in North America made me feel like I was trying to pull some kind of exotic card out my bag of writer’s tricks. I was partly right about the first, wrong about the second. To write about something familiar from home may seem exotic to others, but may be the story you need to tell, which is less exotic to you, than, say writing about an epic slumber party in the heart of Jersey City (not that there is anything wrong with slumber parties or Jersey City). Like many, though, I finally felt inspired when was leaving Johannesburg to immigrate to Canada. And my doubts about being able to do the story justice, helped. I learned to tread carefully (but more on this later).

It was a tipping point, in many ways, but immigration is not super convenient for research. At high school, we’d spent a number of years studying apartheid history, and the Soweto Uprising in particular. This was a starting point, and a good one—I’d been a teenager then and remembered the experience of reading about it in a textbook. But it needed to be real. And for me, to make history breathe is to make it fiction.

After that, it was a lot of trawling through English and American libraries for the odd reference book on primary resources, and of course, the internet. And South Africans, too.

Arushi Raina, presently of Vancouver, B.C.

YSL: Inhabiting the minds of two black characters living under apartheid is a bold step. How could you feel confident that you were doing them justice? And what do you make of Lionel Shriver’s recent provocations on the subject of cultural appropriation?

AR: I think it is, and having grown up in Johannesburg, the complexities of the country and race relations are raw to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Being closer makes it harder to describe the context in large, defined brushstrokes. And the short answer to your question is no: I can never be fully confident that I’m doing them justice. I can only give my very best shot, I can tread carefully, questioning my assumptions at each step, pulling forward a universal humanity while not shying away from some of those differences. I can look at primary sources and read the words of the South African township youth (there are a number of speeches and records of letters available) - these words are sharper, more eloquent, than anything I could put to paper.

I think the attempt to reach and respectfully tell stories in other voices, marginalized voices is important, as much as the openness to further discussion and debate on my attempt, and depiction is important. I don’t want to be defensive, I want to try my best because it is an important story rarely told, and I want to hear all people’s views, least not South African teens. I think Lionel Shriver is contributing a specific point of view to the discussion, and she’s put forward a number of rather out-there examples. Living in post-apartheid South Africa, interacting with First Nations groups in Canada has made me aware that where there is pain, there is a need to tread carefully. But this does not lessen our responsibility to empathize and try telling difficult stories, always empowering these communities to either be involved or discuss/question what we do as storytellers. That’s really where our learning begins, or at least I hope it does.

YSL: Early in the novel, Thabo says, “it was stupid to put the one thing that mattered to you in a red dress for everyone to see”. And yet he does, repeatedly, because he doesn’t believe he has a choice. This is a powerful metaphor for a lot of things that happen in the novel. Is choice – or the lack thereof - largely an illusion for your characters?

AR: That’s a tricky one. I’d like to think that the characters, including Thabo, come face-to- face with a narrowing pool of difficult choices. And their resilience is in their ability to make and come to grips with these choices.

YSL: Each interracial relationship in the novel begins with antagonism, or at least guarded suspicion. This is logical enough and I imagine there’s a lot of historical evidence for interracial romances like Jack’s and Zanele’s. I’m curious about Zanele and Meena, too. How unusual was it to form platonic friendships across racial barriers?

AR: Pretty unusual. Talking to South Africans who lived through that time, you only did so if you really stuck your neck out. Your entire life wasn’t designed for you to do so. In the rare cases they did, it was through anti-apartheid activism, which, to Meena’s credit, she does get embroiled in.

YSL: Family bonds seem largely broken and/or ineffectual in your portrait of South African society. Jack’s parents value his academic achievements and whatever glory his bright future can reflect upon them; Zanele’s mother is trapped both by single parenthood and institutional racism; and Meena’s relationship with her father is dutiful but remote. This is surely not a coincidence! What connection do you see between a dehumanizing body politic and its subjects’ humanity?

AR: You know, I never really noticed this until you pointed it out! The parents sort of wrote themselves that way, inflected of course, through the point of views of their children. As you’ve pointed out, in many ways the apartheid institution wears at the very core of the family—in Zanele’s case, her family has been split apart by labour and group area act laws, breaking open all the cracks that may have lain underneath a family that didn’t suffer the same injustice. In Meena’s, she has to come to terms with the strange triaging of color, where Indians were treated marginally better to black people. To take advantage of this slight preferential treatment is a recipe for survival, and Meena’s father has already surrendered to it.

I also think that families can be a source of insulation from the threats of the wider world. In many cases, they were, in apartheid South Africa, from my friends’ parents’ accounts. For Meena, Zanele, Thabo and Jack to be who they end up being, they needed to have the insulation damaged, or ripped off.

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation (or two) that really encapsulates the flavour of When Morning Comes?

AR:

“It’s the kind of storm that happens only on the Highveld, the thunder loud and rapid. She doesn’t speak. I need her to. Maybe she’s counting the people who’ve died since we first met.”

YSL: Thank so much, Arushi. While it's a cliché to call a novel timely, that is precisely the case here. I hope When Morning Comes is very widely read, especially at a time such as this.

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This post is my (Ying's) last as a regular History Girl. Thank you to everyone who read and commented over the past two years! If you'd like to keep in touch, please consider signing up for my sporadic author newsletter.

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Arushi Raina grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. So far, Arushi’s also lived in Egypt, Nigeria, India, the US, UK, and most recently, Canada. At Vassar College in New York, Arushi studied Economics and English, where she was able to put together the beginnings of When Morning Comes. Besides writing, Arushi enjoys travelling, arguments, and long car rides. As a day job, Arushi works as a consultant. One day she’ll explain what that means.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (also called The Agency quartet in North America). She's presently writing a novel set in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

Pablo Fanque Catherine Johnson

Pablo Fanque and his trained Steed

This is another of those - why didn't I know that already? - posts. Pablo Fanque Victorian Impresario, Equestrian walker par exellence. He is massively famous, featuring in the Beatle's song - For The Benefit of Mr Kite - inspired by this poster John Lennon bought in an antique shop in Sevenoaks in the late sixties. And look at him on that fabulous horse! It is me in another body, one of my dreams come true. I never got as far as vaulting lessons sadly and now I think my body wouldn't could with the many many fallings off.

You all know the song Lennon wrote inspired by the poster, of course you do! If I type the first few lines no doubt you'll get the tune in your head....

For the benefit of Mr Kite
There will be a show tonight...

I just thought it was a tune. one of those late sixties faux Victorian psychedlicy nonsensey things like Maxwells' Silver Hammer or I am The Walrus....

But no, here's a man who was the best rider, a man who could make horses dance, who could breed as well as train and wh was the best circus rider of his day.

Pablo was born plain William Darby in Norwich in 1810, his father was a butler, and he was apprenticed to William Batty, who owned a small travelling circus aged 11.

He performed as Young Derby to begin with, eventually choosing the name Pablo Fanque and becoming renowned as a horseman. He didn't set up his own touring Circus until the 1840s, but he was also famous for horse breeding and training. His horses were known for their ability to dance and much prized.

The Illustrated London News said of his London debut in 1847;

Mr. Pablo Fanque is an artiste of colour, and his steed ... we have not only never seen surpassed, but never equalled ... Mr. Pablo Fanque was the hit of the evening. The steed in question was Beda, the black mare that Fanque had bought from Batty. That the horse attracted so much attention was testament to Fanque's extraordinary horse training skills.

Pablo Fanque's Circus toured all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, but his circus was especially popular in the North in Yorkshire and Lancashire. But a showman's life was always precarious and he endured bankruptcy and personal disaster too, when the arena in Leeds they were performing in collapsed, leading to the death of his first wife, Susannah.

In 1869 a near tragedy was avoided when the tightrope walker, Madame Caroline lost her footing on a high wire 60 foot in the air fell. She held onto the rope with her hands and the riggers managed to lower the rope a few feet, then Caroline jumped and was caught by the crowd.

Fanque died in 1871 in Stockport, and there was a procession with his favourite horse following the mourners and brass band.

I'd always known the song, but never about Pablo, a man who out dressaged most and was respected and massively successful, his circus being one of the top troupes of the arts' golden age. 

After his death the Showmen's Guild chaplain said; "In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for although Pablo was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability."

William Darby aka Pablo Fanque

Catherine's latest book is Blade and Bone published by Walker Books

SEEKING THE TRUTH IN A 'BOGUS' HISTORY – Elizabeth Fremantle

A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context.

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more.

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present.

Take, for example Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a fiction which used the Salem witch-trials of the 1660s as a way to speak about the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities that swept through Hollywood during Miller’s time. The parallels of these two events, and Miller’s fictional account of the former, allowed those living through the McCarthy witch-hunts to scrutinise a contemporary event through the lens of a historical parallel.There are many such stories from the past, which could be used to shed light on the present. The recent US election brought to my mind the vilification and downfall of Anne Boleyn – a woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking to operate in a misogynist political arena. Hillary Clinton, like Boleyn, was labelled a ‘witch’, crooked, corrupt, unwomanly, unfit and even as having committed treason. This, for me, makes Anne Boleyn’s story potentially relevant as a feminist narrative. And it is fiction that would have the power and license to put it to work as a mirror to contemporary political misogyny. In this way fiction can be a means to access another, different kind of truth.

The late great Lisa Jardine discussed the role of fiction in history in Radio 4’s A Point of View (2014) in which she talks about her response to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between two scientists who each played a role in the development of the atom bomb. She said, ‘Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically, in order to give us emotional access to the past.’ So, where the ‘proper’ historical author might be seeking an empirical truth the fiction writer might in turn be seeking an emotional truth; but there is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between these apparently opposing positions. Facts and events do not occur in a vacuum without a human response. It is the feelings that events inspire that many fiction writers aim to access.

Fiction is simply another mode through which we can understand history. Take Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell, which go against the prevailing historical narrative of Thomas More as a ‘good’ person and Cromwell as ‘bad.’ Mantel does what a biographer cannot, she depicts Cromwell (a man about whom relatively little is known, given the enormity of his legacy) as a rounded individual, a vengeful and ambitious man who oversaw despicable acts yet also was capable of fierce loyalty and tenderness, who loved his wife and children. She places him as an entire person in her fictional world, extrapolating his love for his daughter from a touching line in his will. This view is assumption – plausible, yet not fact.

But Mantel’s choice of Cromwell as protagonist in her fiction allows us to look at ideas about social mobility, both then and now. The authorial admiration for a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from obscurity to high office bubbles up through the text but it doesn't make it any less relevant or useful as a narrative describing both the past and the present. This is not history in the conventional sense but it shines a light into the dark crannies of history making a valid and interesting depiction of an inaccessible past.

We can’t help but regard the past through the prism of our own particular time. So the Cromwell of Robert Bolt’s mid 1960s play and film A Man For all Seasons is different to the Cromwell of Wolf Hall, more than forty years later, precisely because they are speaking to different generations. So when fiction is historical it is also necessarily contemporary. Fiction exists to ask questions and it is a valid enquiry to ask about how we regard the past and how the past impacts on the present.

Many writers now look to the past to tease out the stories of those who lacked a voice in, or were deemed insignificant by, mainstream history. Often the historical record is partial when it comes to such narratives so fiction serves to fill in the gaps. Previous generations have focused on women’s stories almost exclusively from a romantic perspective, as this upheld the prevailing narrative of the time that women were politically unimportant. You only have to look at the way the Victorians chose to see a figure like Katherine Parr as an obedient nursemaid to a tyrannical husband when contemporary narratives see her as a highly intelligent political activist and author. It is possible she was both of these things but we reject the story of obedience now, as it doesn’t fit with our view of how women should behave in the twenty-first century. We increasingly seek out women from the past who sought to define their own existence in a world that denied them that right, as this chimes with our prevailing ideals of feminism. Using fiction to look between the lines of history urges us to scrutinise our present attitudes and better understand them.

The invisible stories are important. The fact that Homosexuals (even the term is only a century old) and ethnic minority groups barely existed in the received western historical narrative doesn't mean they weren't there. And it becomes the role of fiction to imagine a plausible narrative and fill in the empty spaces as authors like Sarah Waters and Toni Morrison have done to great effect. At this moment in our cultural history we are preoccupied with issues about gender identity and multi-culturism so it seems natural that we might also look to the past even if only to see how far we have progressed but also to ensure we don’t return there.

If we are to learn from the past then we must first seek to understand it and fiction is another tool by which we can do this. Jardine quotes Michael Frayn, to make her point. ‘The great challenge is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions, The only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’ For me this goes some way to demonstrate that though the term historical fiction may seem oxymoronic there is deception in history just as there is truth in fiction and both serve a useful purpose in helping us to understand the present.

References:

Litt, Toby – Against Historical Fiction – Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No 1. Language and Languages (2008), pp 111-115

Jardine, Lisa – A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact, BBC 2014

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four novels set in the Tudor and Elizabethan period. For information about Elizabeth Fremantle's fiction see elizabethfremantle.com

The Consolation of Seneca, by Antonia Senior

Seneca is having a moment. There are two excellent new biographies out about him: Dying every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm and Seneca, a Life, by Emily Wilson. The Senecans, by Peter Stothard, my old boss at The Times[1], weaves the tale of a sort of high-brow Senecan fan-club with the politics of Thatcher.

In Glasgow at half-term. I was buying a copy of Seneca’s letters. I already own them, but this was a new edition with such a beautiful binding, I could not resist. The lovely Waterstones bookseller there said: “Seneca’s really big at the moment. He keeps cropping up. I should read him.”

“You should!” I cried in a slightly excessive squeal.

SENECA

We all should. Seneca is the antidote to our liberal malaise. He gives a hope for living intelligently in a surreal world. His is the intellectual rigour that could give bulk to all the mindfulness crap that is ubiquitous and yet hollow. I started reading him for research; I now read him for consolation, for joy and for pity.

I first came across him a few years ago, when I was doing a MA in Ancient History at Birkbeck under the wonderful Catherine Edwards. I’d been rather turned off the Stoics by the experience of translating Cicero’s advocacy for A-level. Dear Lord.

But Seneca and I got on, pretty quickly. (I also fell in love with his nephew Lucan; but his violent bitterness is a story for another blog.)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was an equestrian of Spanish heritage. He was born around the same time as Christ – or a little earlier. His father was a rhetorician, and Seneca and his three brothers were immersed early in the Rome of letters and politics.

Seneca’s health was dreadful throughout his life – and he spent some time convalescing in Egypt as a young man. He returned to Rome and began to make connections in the court, becoming friends particularly with the Emperor Caligula’s sisters Agrippina and Julia Livilla. On the accession of Claudius, Seneca was charged with and adulterous affair with Julia and exiled to Corsica.

He was recalled by Agrippina on her marriage to Claudius and installed as the tutor to her son, Nero in AD 49. Claudius’ death in AD meant that Seneca’s charge became the most important man in the Western World. Yes, the source of all political power was a fat megalomaniac with bad hair and an attraction to showbiz that terrified the political elite: imagine that if you can people.

NERO: even scarier than The Donald

Seneca essentially believed that the purpose of life is to become a sapiens, or a wise man. The ideal wise Stoic is free, tranquil and happy at all times. This is clearly hard to achieve – and Cicero particularly disagreed with the notion that it is possible to divorce yourself from passions. Emily Wilson argues that Seneca’s insistence that a wise life is possible marks the changing times: “It was more important than ever to hang on to an ideal of tranquillity in a world where it is so difficult to achieve.”

Perhaps this accounts for the surge in Seneca’s popularity. In this post-truth politics world of Brexit and Trump, is it time to look for new mentors? Seneca is a very human sage. He was criticised for hypocrisy in his own life-time; partly for his immense wealth and his stated indifference to it. But Seneca’s central dilemma was also a very modern one. How does a virtuous soul approach the exigencies of politics?

Epicureans, who were the alternative school to the Stoics in Rome, believed that the philosopher is obliged to withdraw from public life. That the compromises demanded by politics are anathema to the philosophical soul. Their beliefs demand silence; at most the benign chatter of one’s like-minded friends.

But not the Stoics. Their creed demanded that they were bound to serve the common good. They were duty-bound to engage with power; unless their lives were endangered by their service. But what if the retreat from that power was where the danger lies? What if confronting tyranny, and fleeing tyranny were both suicidal?

The way Tacitus tells the story, the early part of Nero’s reign was a golden age – because Seneca was effectively running the show. But the 17 year old Emperor grew up, began asserting himself, and side-lined his erstwhile mentor. As Nero grew more difficult, Seneca sought to withdraw from political life. He offered his entire fortune to Nero in return for a retirement. But Nero knew that Seneca was the virtuous figleaf that his reign demanded – and refused the request.

Their relationship became poisonous, until at last Seneca became tainted by a conspiracy against the Emperor. He killed himself. Suicide was the great refuge of the sapiens – it guaranteed freedom in the face of tyranny.

I have paraphrased his life. I haven’t even touched on his remarkable tragedies, which explore the darkness of human passions unleashed. Nor his letters, with their sharp insights into daily life. We have a dozen essays, more than 100 letters, nine tragedies and a satirical piece. A treasure trove which keeps on giving. How to give a flavour in this very short blog? Here are just a few of my favourite quotes from a writer famous for his pithiness and paradoxes.

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Summer has gone, but another year will bring it again; winter lies low, but will be restored by its own proper months; night has overwhelmed the sun, but day will soon rout the night again. The wandering stars retrace their former courses; a part of the sky is rising unceasingly, and a part is sinking. 

Letter 36

What then is good? The knowledge of things. What is evil? The lack of knowledge of things. Your wise man, who is also a craftsman, will reject or choose in each case as it suits the occasion; but he does not fear that which he rejects, nor does he admire that which he chooses, if only he has a stout and unconquerable soul. 

Letter 31

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave…..

…“He is a slave.” His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. “He is a slave.” But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who is slave to an old hag, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-maid; I will show you youths of the noblest birth in serfdom to pantomime players! No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.

Letter 47

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[1] He does not know he was my boss. I was a junior reporter writing about pensions. He was editor. He was the Sun King; I was an ant. Everything I know about the strange and wonderful world of Court politics comes from working in a newspaper.