Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair

In a chapter called ‘Pharmakon’ the narrator of Hex analyses the word.

In Ancient Greek pharmakon meant poison and cure and scapegoat. It also meant potion and spell and charm. It could mean artificial color or dye, even paint. It came from roots that meant cut and throat. The pharmakon doesn’t change its name whether it’s noxious or healing, whether it destroys or repairs. We assign human value to these results. Go ahead and employ a drug either in measure, toward health, or in excess, towards oblivion. The pharmakon has no intentions; it cooperates.

Potions that kill or cure fascinate authors. When Roland Deschain walks into a New York pharmacy, he expects ‘a dim, candle-lit room full of bitter fumes, jars of unknown powders and liquids and philters, many covered with a thick layer of dust or spun about with a century’s cobwebs.’ The mundanity of the drugstore blunts him: ‘Here was a salve that was supposed to restore fallen hair but would not; there a cream which promised to erase unsightly spots on the hands and arms but lied.’ The psycho genius of The Secret History (to which Hex has been compared) boasts that ‘The woods will soon be full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I need from flypaper. And even herbs that aren’t common here – good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week.’ In her marvellous study A is for Arsenic, the author (and chemist) Kathryn Harkup explores the use of poisons in Agatha Christie’s novels, derived from Christie’s years working as a nurse and then an apothecary’s assistant – apothecary, now there’s a fantastic literary word. This stuff even comes up in children’s fiction. Professor Snape is denied Hogwarts’s Defence Against the Dark Arts job, but he does get to be Potions Master, with a creepy dungeon classroom that matches his sinister demeanour.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel is conventional only in its use of toxins. Nell Barber is a PhD scientist who has been expelled from Columbia after one of her colleagues dies of thallium poisoning. Exiled from the campus and working in a Brooklyn bar, Nell collects poisonous plants and hangs around the university in adoration of her mentor, Joan Kallas. Her obsession with Joan is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s crush on an older woman who Highsmith glimpsed while working at a department store: her biographer Joan Schenkar articulates it as ‘On one side of the Bloomingdale’s counter was the young, poor, seemingly subservient salesgirl; on the other side, the older, wealthy, apparently dominant Venus in furs.’ Nell is very much the salesgirl in this equation – the young Midwesterner to Joan’s cosmopolitan authority. The novel is presented as Nell’s notebooks, in which she writes about Joan quite as much as she writes about plants. ‘It’s acceptable to admire you,’ Nell writes to Joan. ‘Admiration is the acceptable starting point and I did start there.’

There’s a lot going on in Hex, relationship wise. Nell has split up with her boyfriend Tom, a medievalist who specialises in unicorn myths. Tom then starts having an affair with Joan, who is married to campus HR man Barry, who is having an affair with younger postgraduate Mishti, who is supposed to be with business student Carlo. Knight says that ‘it was a pleasure to design six characters from scratch and put them in maximum exposure to each other. It was like a math problem.’

With all this intrigue going on Nell herself seems like the wan narrator who records everything but doesn’t achieve anything, mooncalfing about and scribbling her cahiers. But Knight loves the character: ‘She has very low vanity, and she’s willing to suffer the indignity of her own indulgence in return for the pleasure of her indulgence. In an environment where everyone is striving for more health and more productivity and more success, it was refreshing to write a character who is really not trying to prove anything or impress anyone.’ And indeed Nell grew on me, certainly by the scene when she chases Barry down the street shouting ‘I’M A VERY GOOD WITCH BARRY… AND HERE IS MY PROPHECY…. YOU WILL BUILD A SHIP OF ROTTEN WOOD AND BLOAT IT AND IT WILL GET VERY BIG… AND YOU WILL SOAK IT IN ROTTEN WATERS AND IT WILL FAIL BARRY… IT WILL FAIL.’

Hex is a very contemporary novel, with characters that talk in riddles and non sequiturs. It’s a hell of a strange read, but also strangely exhilarating – a spooky wood of a book, full of flowers and nightshade alike.

The Lost Kingdom

Delighted that my story of this name has been published in the ‘Archaelogy’ issue of The Writers Cafe – you have to scroll down quite a bit and into the short story section to find me, but still, it’s a fantastic zine and well worth ‘digging into’ (falls over). I hope you like this odd story. And thanks to Marie for publishing.

The Hotel Old England

Last night I reread Zadie Smith’s essay on Fawlty Towers, finding more depth and humanity in it than I remembered from the first time. She remembered watching the box sets with her father when he was dying in a care home by the sea. Smith quotes this from Prunella Scales:

It was probably—may have been—my idea that [Sybil] should be a bit less posh than him, because we couldn’t see otherwise what would have attracted them to each other. I have a sort of vision of her family being in catering on the south coast, you know, and her working behind a bar somewhere, he being demobbed from his national service and getting his gratuity, you know, and going in for a drink and this . . . barmaid behind the bar and she fancied him because he was so posh. And they sort of thought they’d get married and run a hotel together and it was all a bit sort of romantic and idealistic, and the grim reality then caught up with them.

About her father, Smith writes: ‘In life, he found Britain hard. It was a nation divided by postcodes and accents, schools and last names. The humour of its people helped make it bearable.’

A lot of this humanity went into the show itself, which was liberal for its time. Basil complains about 1970s trades-union mediocrity but the 1980s ‘customer is king’ ethos wouldn’t have pleased him either, as we see during his confrontation with the demanding American diner Harry Hamilton. For Basil the guests exist in his hotel at his pleasure. He’s a neurotic man with a few pretensions, obsessed with class and sex, and likes to be – in John Cleese’s words – ‘a little bit grand’. ‘Zoom. What was that? That was your life, mate,’ Basil mutters to himself. ‘Do I get another? No, sorry mate, that’s your lot.’ Basil works off his angst by shouting into the sky. His wife Sybil is more disciplined and takes time for self care, by way of golf, flirtation and long phone calls with her innumerable friends (‘Ooh, I know. He doesn’t deserve you.’) Now and again though, you glimpse the storm. ‘When I think of what I could have had!’ she yells at Basil. There are lighter moments too, like the anniversary episode, which no one likes but gives a more gentle take on their relationship. I don’t think either one would consider leaving the marriage. After dumping on Harry Hamilton’s Californian sunshine lifestyle (‘It must be rather tiring’) Basil gets into an argument with the entire guest population which ends with him storming out into the night. But he just stands in the rain for a moment before marching back into the hotel, to check in as a guest.

Politics was the least of Fawlty Towers. As the psychiatrist says, there’s enough material there for an entire conference.

What prompted this ramble on my part was of course the news that UKTV has taken down ‘The Germans’ episode because of its racist slurs. It ends with Basil doing his Hitler goose step impression in front of a shocked German family. The writers had to do a lot of work to set this up: even the unhinged Basil wouldn’t make such a spectacle of himself under normal circumstances, so they write in a head injury for him and he self discharges against the doctor’s advice. Permanent guest Major Gowen uses foul racist language early in the episode. He’s an eccentric with a limited grip on events, shuffling through his daily routines (‘Is the bar open yet, Fawlty? No particular hurry…’) and sometimes offering a skewed take on whatever’s going on in the episode. As thousands of people have pointed out the joke of the episode is on Basil and the Major for being stuck in the past.

The Guardian article says:

Growing scrutiny over historic racism in archive entertainment programmes is prompting broadcasters to check their back catalogues and respond to criticism of shows that were once considered to be family entertainment.

There has been a substantial uptick in the attention paid to such issues as a result of the global Black Lives Matter movement, which is forcing media companies around the world to address racism within their organisations and in the output they produce and continue to publish.

I am not sure the framing is right here. Fawlty Towers was screened before most of the BLM protestors were even born. And who in BLM has asked networks to take down old TV shows? I’m no expert on Black Lives Matter but it strikes me as a libertarian movement that supports people of colour to be free and live their lives outside the industry of prison-probation-parole, live their lives without being hassled or even killed by law enforcement. American police are militarised and use army ranks. Everyone’s armed, so the stakes are higher. The gesture politics of TV companies is light years away from the American cities where cops are valorised and speaking out against them carries real risk. (Read Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker’s Busted for a look at how bad things can get in police cities.)

I would not say there are not similar problems in the UK. Nor do I condemn the tearing down of statues. But the fall of Edward Colston strikes me as a watershed moment where the conversation shifted towards symbols and issues and away from what’s actually going on in the world. You can see the talking heads and sixth-form debaters, initially wrong-footed by the protests, find the familiar grooves of what passes for argument in their circles. Has cancel culture gone too far? Shouldn’t comedy make you uncomfortable? What, we can’t even watch Little Britain now?

There is much talk about reckoning with Britain’s past, as if that’s a new and brave thing. But we have had the reckoning many times. One of the problems Brexit caused (and Remainers like me were just as guilty of this) was that it has encouraged the British to look inward into our culture and past, rather than outward at what was going on in the world, indeed at what was going on in our own country. We have been living in this hotel for too long. We should be brave enough to walk into the rainy night and see what’s out there.

Is the bar open yet, Fawlty?

(Image: Wikipedia)