P.Viktor

The Kenneth Williams Diaries

“The preoccupation with diary writing is caused by various things: the desire to keep a record which can be useful later, and committing to paper what can’t be communicated to a mentor… oh! all kinds of reasons, but fundamentally it is about loneliness”. Tuesday, 8 March 1988.

In February I saw the BBC3 drama Fantabulosa, a portrayal of Kenneth Williams based on his diaries. Michael Sheen’s performance is quite spectacular – he manages to capture the man without imitating or caricaturing him. Throughout the programme Sheen narrates directly from the diaries, and it so it gives the whole affair a very intimate, personal feel, and offers a picture of William’s rarely seen before. I bought the diaries some years ago, I think after I had seen a documentary about William’s life, which was one of the first to change the popular perception of the comic actor. At eight hundred pages I left it on the shelf gathering dust, perhaps never having enough time to do them justice. After seeing Fatabulosa my curiosity led me back to them. I wanted to know more about this man who I had always had huge affection for and laughed and giggled with in my childhood during the Carry Ons, Jackanory, and Willo’the’Wisp, the man who brought laughter to so many but who had very little for himself. 

Kenneth Williams is widely known for his comic performances, his high camp, his outrageousness, and his forgivable rudeness. He had excellent comedy timing, and in the Carry Ons he was the one actor you often looked forward to seeing. But the man, like many comics seem to be, was a deeply unhappy individual. He was a gay man caught in a time when homosexuality was still illegal, and even though times moved on and homosexuality was decriminalised, he still met with great disdain and reproach in a Britain that was still largely racist and homophobic. He was extremely religious and had a fervent belief in god, and this was also at odds with his homosexuality. It is widely believed (and the diaries support this) that he remained a virgin his whole life. His relationships, if one could ever call them that, were brief misunderstandings and humiliations, and yet ironically, the one thing he always wanted was a partner that he could love and who could love him. But, because of these conflicts within him, and his inability to commit emotionally and sexually, it never happened, and that does seem the greatest tragedy of his life.

Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach

I have been a fan of McEwan’s since I read Black Dogs (1998) during a Postmodernism module for my English degree. I hated the module, but I loved the book, reading it in one sitting and feeling horrible envious at McEwan’s terse prose and narrative skill. Ten years later and I am still in awe having read much of his output in the interim. He is probably one of the very few living writers I actually get excited about, and since Atonement (2001), generally considered the start of his ‘mature period’, I have been eagerly anticipating his latest novel. Well, as eagerly as waiting for the paperback edition to come out (I have never been a fan of the hardback book – so cumbersome, so intractable, so expensive). Having been very patient I recently bought On Chesil Beach, released last year, and it is by far one of the finest works in this vaunted period of maturity.

Relatively short at 166 pages (Atonement was twice as long), the novel tells the story of Edward and Florence, two young newly weds, who have arrived in a Devonshire hotel for their wedding night. What would normally be a moment of great excitement and anticipation turns, in a very McEwanian way, into a nightmare of frustrations, misinterpretations, and horrifying revelations. What I have always admired about McEwan is the way he is able to take such a basic premise and turn it, by some literary alchemy, into a gripping story, an effect most notable in his gripping thriller Enduring Love (1997).

Sylvia Plath - The Great Poet

This week the Guardian is releasing a series of slim volumes (so slim they are almost chapbooks) of Great Poets of the Twentieth Century with copies of their newspaper. Today it was the turn of the only female poet in the Guardian’s slightly one-sided list, Sylvia Plath, conspicuous amongst her male contemporaries Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, and Sassoon.

The slim volume is actually rather lovely, the cover with a matt finish and utilitarian look much like poetry volumes of the 1960s. Inside is a wood cut of Plath and the famous Cambridge photograph everyone knows. The foreword is by the writer Margaret Drabble which, despite being a very concise and potted history, is perhaps one of the best and most eloquent introductions to Plath’s life I have read.

The poems You’re, The Swarm, The Applicant, Daddy, Ariel, Lady Lazarus, and Edge are featured, all conspicuously taken from the late poetry, whilst her early work is looked over (something of a shame, especially as all the above poems are perhaps Plath’s most read and reprinted, although indisputably her best). The volume ends with a facsimile of the Ariel poem manuscript, which I believe has already been published in Ariel: The Restored Edition, and two rare archive reviews, one for The Colossus by Bernard Bergonzi, and one for Ariel by Richard Kell, both of which are abridged and available in full on the Guardian website.

A nice collectors item, one can only be thankful that Plath is still considered amongst her highly acclaimed peers as one of the best writers of her generation. The Ted Hughes volume will be released with the Observer on Saturday, and will feature a foreword by Jeanette Winterson.

Resources

Great Poets of Twentieth Century

Margaret Drabble

A Birthday Present

‘I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year’

On October 27th Sylvia Plath would have been 75 had she not committed suicide. It seems strange to imagine what she would have been like if she had not put her head in the oven on that bitterly cold February morning in 1963. She would be an old woman now, having outlived Ted Hughes (who died in 1998) and no doubt thinking on her marriage with him with some amusement. ‘Aaah, the follies of youth’ she might have said. What would she have been like? Perhaps a literary doyenne in the style of Doris Lessing or Muriel Spark. Or a staunch feminist like Germaine Greer. Or perhaps she would have become a professional homemaker and cook, like Nigella Lawson or Delia Smith. She might have had a house in London, perhaps in Bloomsbury or Primrose Hill, the appointed Queen of her own literary salon and editor no doubt of several well-established poetry journals. She would perhaps be at a time in her life when she would be collating the unwieldy manuscript of her full collected poems, or, having gone as far as she could with poetry when she wrote Ariel, given it all up in favour of prose, dusting off her latest satirical, savage novel about London life. She would no doubt be grandmother to a large brood of grandchildren from her first marriage, and perhaps some from second and third marriages. And she would perhaps be quite content in her staggering array of achievements.

Alas, we will never know what Plath would become. When she died she was only thirty years old and the greatest portion of her life was tragically never lived. But in the first thirty years she achieved more than many writers do in a lifetime – a substantial amount of poetry, prose, journals and letters. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of her birth the Plath industry is oiling up its cogs to commemorate both her life and her work. To start with, the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Indiana University, are hosting the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium in October (25th – 29th).  The Rothermere Institute will host the four day event, with a long list of Plath-based lectures, discussions, debates and presentations. Highlights include talks by renowned Plath scholars such as Lynda K. Bundtzen who will be discussing Hughes’ ‘Howls and Whispers’, Linda Wagner Martin discussing the Plath archives, Sandra Lahire’s trilogy of films about Plath, the Elisabeth Gray play ‘Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath’, Anne Stevenson’s discussion of Plath’s relationship with her psychoanalyst, and Al Alvarez and Diane Middleton’s much anticipated talk about their relationship to Plath and Hughes. A full list of events is available here.