Sandwiching

English sandwich (British Sandwich Week Contest entry)

INTERVIEWER

     Do you think that an elliptical method like that* has a function other than, as you say, suggesting the tautness and spareness of a particular situation?

MR  GREEN

     I don't know, I suppose the more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in -- not true of taking the filling out of a sandwich, of course -- but if one kept a diary, one wouldn't want a minute-to-minute catalogue of one's dreadful day.

American sandwich from Carnegie Delicatessen, New York City

*  Reader Note:   Terry Southern's interview with the English novelist Henry Green (the excerpt here concerns Green's second novel, Living, and its notable omission of definite articles throughout the text), which was published in the Summer 1958  issue (No. 19) of the Paris Review, remains one of the most enjoyable, amusing and enlightening artifacts of Green's remarkable career.  It is anthologized in the collection of previously unpublished Henry Green writings called Surviving.  The interview can also be found online Here.

Terry Southern photographed by Stanley Kubrick near Shepperton Studios, Surrey, 1962, during the production of Dr. Strangelove

           The Paris Review interview is well worth reading and re-reading.  Like all of Green's work, you don't and can't take it all in at once, although the comment I've selected, about suiting style to subject matter, is pretty straightforward.  Some of us are a lot more skilled at this than others.  The other day I tried to write about something that recently caused me to be enervated at a time when I was extremely tired.  In other words, I had been shocked semi-awake by an unpleasant event and I tried to convey this by writing a series of overlong, edgy-seeming sentences, which I normally wouldn't do.  I think I was trying to convey fatigue and anxiety in the way Ray Davies did by elongating lines and pauses in Tired Of Waiting For You, although my mood felt distinctly more Kurt Cobain-desperate.  I'm not sure my effort succeeded, but at least I expelled, briefly,  the demon experience from my body. 

Talk Talk (Mark Hollis, l.)

           Green's comment about sandwiches reminded me of  something that happened to Caroline during the 1980s when she was working as a publicist for the fine London band, Talk Talk.  Caroline's job involved devising and executing public relations campaigns for rock groups, including soliciting and arranging  press articles and reviews.  This often involved long days of back-to-back interviews at the record company for the acts, who were usually exhausted from the daily grind of performing and constant travel. One day, Caroline ordered an extra-special "New York-style lunch" to be delivered to EMI Records' Manhattan offices  from the famous Carnegie Delicatessen.   When Carnegie's trademark offerings arrived, Mark Hollis, Talk Talk's soft-spoken and mild-mannered composer and singer, became noticeably agitated at the sight of the sandwich monuments in the way one might imagine a just-unblindfolded Druid acting when coming into view of Stonehenge and thinking "this means curtains for Gareth" or something like that.  Mark is an exceedingly polite person, but he knew his own mind and intentions, and Caroline noticed him begin quietly and deliberately to deconstruct Carnegie's work by removing and discarding about 9/10th of the sandwich's fillings.  When she asked him what on earth he was doing, he replied that he was making the New York sandwich into an English sandwich.  
 

Stray Cats


          Several months later when the Stray Cats, a New York band who had gone to England to achieve enormous success, returned in triumph to the U.S., one of the first things they enjoyed during a record company visit was a Carnegie Deli sandwich luncheon.  The group liked England quite a bit and they were highly appreciative both of their UK success and their British fans. They said that English sandwiches were another thing altogether, however.  They were, in their view, lacking in just about everything except for miniscule portions of green-tinged roast beef, soggy lettuce and bread that seemed cottony and unpalatable.  These criticisms mirrored earlier ones of The Ramones, another group Caroline worked with at the beginning of their career.  When that band returned from their first U.K. junket, they complained that the milk they were served contained floating debris and the Coca-Cola tasted funny.  I would like to think that Henry Green, the author of  Living,  would have appreciated The Ramones for their humor and their radical, simplified approach to writing and performing music in order to achieve maximum impact.  

        The very best record company party I ever attended was a "listening party" celebrating the release of the the group's second album, The Ramones Leave Home.  The party was held in an over-crowded New York recording studio near Washington Square and featured Carnegie Deli sandwiches, Veuve Clicquot champagne and, of course, the new Ramones record, a great one that in the best American tradition "moved the ball forward."

The Ramones

Henry Green

Verging (Adventure In A Room)

       Today, being Jane’s next –to-last day before she becomes a “high schooler” (finals ended two days ago; her commencement  – called “Moving Up Day” at her school, which was also her mother’s and grandmother’s  -- is tomorrow), made me think of this very early piece by Henry Green, written while he was an 18-year old Oxford undergraduate.   It is clearly an early attempt at writing his first novel, Blindness, which like his later Back, I find almost unbearable to read because they treat painful subjects in such a “real” way.   The main character in Blindness, a young man just leaving his public school (neatly called “Note”, it is Eton, Green’s public school spelled backward; the man really had a touch in everything he did), is blinded while riding the train home after the end of Term when a rock thrown by a boy shatters the train window.   Amazingly, the same thing happened to me on the Long Island Railroad during high school when my train passed through Forest Hills on my way home from a summer job in Manhattan.   I was unharmed, thank heaven.  This occurred in the era before people sued even if they weren’t hurt and the newspapers and television, because of time and space constraints, didn’t  report  every little weird thing that happened, leaving nothing to memory and future imagination.   

       The Green piece, bearing the excellent title Adventure In a Room, is far from the best thing he ever wrote (the same can be said for Blindness, I think), but shows how very talented he was.  For after Blindness (1926) came Living (1929) and then Party Going (1939) and nothing would ever be the same.

Excerpt from Adventure In A Room (Unpublished c. 1923)

He sat in the Windsor chair, gazing about his room.  It was his last night at Note.  All round were the trifles, the few intimacies of his school life.   For six years he lived with the same old furniture.  He had changed his rooms once or twice, but never the wall paper.  The small brass figure, talking so severely to his dog, must know him very well, he thought.  And it was his last night, tomorrow he would be leaving.  Those pictures too, they had looked down on him all the time he had been at Note.  The paroquet pictures, the few third-rate prints, his own drawing that Armstrong had said showed such originality, his faithful looking glass – all of them must know him well.  His bat he looked on as a pugilist looks on his hands.  He had used his bat for so long without its ever having split that he had come to regard it as part of himself.  The way it ‘drove’ made him think it was alive.  And his books.  Dull school books.  God!  There was a Badminton he had forgotten to return to the school library.  Tomorrow .  .  .  .

(For another kind of "Eton Mess", please see Here for a real seasonal treat.)

Anthem

        Because there are few women who occupied the position Virginia Woolf assumed in her lifetime.  She says here somewhere that she can't bear what, in her own day, was written about Bloomsbury, and indeed thought, at one moment, to do her own guide to it.  But she cannot be blamed if she was singled out as she was.  Not so much the brilliance of her husband and friends, as her own genius, isolated her in a limelight all her own.  It is to her credit that she seems to despise this.  Nevertheless we can, in this volume, watch her fame rise, and then, in her own estimation, wane.  She takes a pleasure in both, as is perhaps natural in the self-comforting of a diary.  For it appears she can never get away from herself.  But then who can?

From:  Henry Green, A Writer's Diary (Review published in The London Magazine, 1954).  

Please also consult Here

and find a link to  the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice.

 

Literary Gossip, January 25, 1956 (Christopher Isherwood Diaries)

Christopher Isherwood


January 25*

         Today I had a drink with John Lehmann, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke.**  They told me about Evelyn Waugh's nervous breakdown.  He went into a bar in Cairo, and the bartender said, "Good afternoon, Sir," and Waugh just grunted.  And a voice said to Waugh: "You'd have spoken to him if he'd been a Lord."  Graham looked quite sleek and handsome -- much younger than in his photographs.  He said this was because he is always photographed when he has a hangover.

        Much talk about Cyril Connolly's famous marital troubles, which he broadcasts all over Europe.

Graham Greene

Henry Yorke

John Lehmann photographed at Ham Spray seated between Rosamond Lehmann (l) and Lytton Strachey (r)

Excerpt from:  Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, Volume One, 1939-1960). London, Methuen, 1996.

* According to Wikipedia, there are no other notable world events that occurred on January 25, 1956. Therefore, I believe this London meeting of three important masters of 20th century British literatrue and a key British publisher held for purposes of cutting up prominent members of their circle constitutes something of a historical "discovery." 

** Henry Yorke wrote novels under the pen name Henry Green.  To help sort out the gossip, players and scorecard, you may possibly be interested in seeing this, this,  this, and this  for Henry Green, and here, here,  here and here for more Graham Greene.

Disappointing. (Kim Philby In Moscow 1963-88)

          

Kim Philby, 1955, "Third Man" press conference, London

(Click on link to view excerpt.)

          On his defection to Moscow in 1963, Philby had been dismayed to discover that he held only agent status in the KGB, did not hold officer rank and was not even allowed to set foot  inside the Lubyanka.  For the first five years of his Moscow exile, however, he was kept occupied by long debriefing sessions, helping to ghostwrite the memoirs of Konon Molody (published under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale”) and writing a sprightly, but tendentious memoir of his own career as a Soviet agent inside SIS, published in 1968 under the title of My Silent War.   Philby made no mention of the disappointments of his life in Moscow.  Instead, he claimed that , “As I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.”  Philby concluded his preface with words which were intended to inspire others:

"It is a sobering thought, that for the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist idea, the Old World, if not the whole world, would now be ruled by Hitler and Hirohito.  It is a matter of great pride to me that I was invited , at so early an age, to play my infinitesimal part in building up that power… When the proposition [to join Soviet intelligence] was made to me, I did not hesitate.  One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.”

Kim Philby photographed on the street in Moscow, 1970s

Lubyanka, KGB Headquarters (originally built as All Russian Insurance Company), before 1917. Click on photo to enlarge.

:

Kim Philby, USSR commemorative stamp, 1990

Excerpt: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.
by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, New York, Basic Books, 1999, page 415.

Bravery (Part 1)

Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant (1845-1902), Arabian Nights

  

        In considering  Doughty’s writing, it is necessary to examine his circumstances.  He started with no more than two large saddlebags, in one of which was a little money and a stock of medicines which he sold.  He went into the heart of a country in which it was held a merit to kill Christians for their faith and fair sport to murder any traveler, whatever his religion, for loot.  He set out with no other protection than a revolver and to the last retained a fixed determination, amounting to mania, never to say, the few words, no more than, “There is no God but Allah”, that would have spared him the people’s fanaticism.  His money he spent, or had stolen from him, before he turned homewards, and while he was yet some weeks away from the safety of the coast, he was destitute, being offered work as a herdsman.

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864),  Approach To Mount Sinai.

        “Abide with me, Khahil, till the Haj come and return again, next Spring.” “How might I live those many months?  is there food in the khala?”  “You may keep my camels.”  “But how under the flaming sun, in the long summer season?”  “When it is hot thou canst sit in my booth, and drink leban; and I will give thee a wife.” Hearing his words, I rejoiced that the Arab no longer looked upon me as some rich stranger amongst  them!”

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864),  Arabs Of The Desert.

        A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality.  But what a man is also makes the way he writes, as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance  which is, essentially, a side of his character.  There are fashions in underwear, for the most part unconscious in that we are not particularly aware of how we dress.  It is possible to date almost any paragraph within fifty years by the use and juxtaposition of words in it.  The more mannered the way of life, as in the eighteenth century, the harder it is to break through the convention to the man beneath.  But with Doughty the man’s integrity is such that he writes on his own, if the dates were not available it would be hard to say when.

"The clouds of the second locust brood . . . wreathing and flickering as motes in the sunbeam, flew over us for some days, thick as rain, from near the soil to great height in the atmosphere. They alight as birds, letting down their long shanks to the ground; these invaded the booths, and for blind hunger, even bit our shins, as we sat at coffee. They are borne freely flying at the wind's list, as in the Psalms, 'I am tossed up and down as the locust" -- Charles M. Doughty, Travels In Arabia Deserta

Reader Note:  Paragraphs 1-3 excerpted from: Henry Green, Apologia (Published in No. 4 Folios of New Writing, 1941); Republished in Surviving – The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. Matthew Yorke.  New York, Viking, 1992. 
Interested readers might also wish to take a look at this and this.

"as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance  which is, essentially, a side of his character"

Foretold : Mood (Beginning of Henry Green's unfinished second novel, c. 1926)

She walks down Oxford Street.

When she heard that high, loud educated voice she saw the Blue Train where it was so much in evidence, then the boat where was no sound of it throughout the crossing, and the English Pullman where it again triumphed, crying:  My dear I went to sleep before the boat started and didn't wake up till my maid told me we were in.  My dear, that same voice said, what people want is to lie naked in the sun and that drives everyone further south to where it's all unknown.   There was that same kind of voice, here in Oxford Street, this time proclaiming: The most lovely sponge.  She looked and there was that same kind of woman coming out of a shop. -- A most lovely sponge which -- and then several buses cut short its price and the story of how that sponge was bought.  She wondered where that woman bought her sponges. One shouldn't go just anywhere for one's sponge.  For what is a sponge, -- and this she felt but did not think.  Why it is picked from the sea, it is cleaned and dried, perhaps a lot of things are done to it perhaps nothing very much.  Perhaps a little salt is left in it.  Here she sailed.  For, when she heard that woman talk, so she remembered the clatter of knives and forks, the absolute roar of chasses and good living and she remembered how, in the Pullman, she had longed to be in a restaurant again where it was famous and lots of people you knew.  She said no I will never go abroad again unless I go with a thousand people, it's really too squalid there being just three or four of you.  The sea and everything, it just won't do, she said, if there isn't a whole crowd one knows.  It's like going when you're by yourself and turning on the gramophone.  Or like a sponge in the water in an empty bath.

Foretold -- Three incredible beginnings of novels (In my beginning is my end)

 

FOG was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

     There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty feet above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once.  She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon. 

     -- Henry Green, Party Going, 1939

 

HUDDLED up in a cope of gold wrought silk he peered around.  Society had rallied in force.  A christening -- and not a child's.

     -- Ronald Firbank, Concerning The Eccentricities Of Cardinal Pirelli, 1926

  
Click!... Here it was again!  He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again...Click!...

     Or would the word 'snap' or 'crack' describe it better?

     It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise.  It was the sound a noise makes when it abruptly ceases:  it had a temporary deafening effect.  It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.  And yet he was not physically deaf:  it was merely that in this physical way alone could he think of what had happened in his head.

     It was though a shutter had fallen.  It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a crack or a snap.  It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could 'blink' his brain it would at once be dispelled.  A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of 'film' too -- a 'talkie'.  It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed.  The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world.   Life, in fact, which had once been for him a moment ago a 'talkie', had all at once become a silent film.  And there was no music.

     He was not frightened, because by now he was used to it.

     -- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square, 1941

Major Minor

For the last ten days or so, I have been crazy from the heat, sick as a dog, demented by details and generally inattentive. But all the while I’ve been planning to post a piece here, which I finally decided to call Major Minor, which is the name of a fine Peter Blegvad song that appears on his album, The Naked Shakespeare.

Originally, I had simply intended to write a short appreciation (because I am not a professional critic, that seemed to be the proper appellation for my projected effort) of the 20th century English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton, who is probably best known for his successful stage plays Rope and Gaslight, both later made into famous, highly regarded motion pictures. Although I enjoy both plays (and think the recent transformation of “gaslight” into a verb is fascinating, if disturbing, language and behavior issue), I strongly prefer Hamilton’s novels (early to late, from Craven House through Unknown Assailant) and thought I would include in the post the section of Claud Cockburn’s memorable introduction to The Slaves of Solitude where he recalls Hamilton’s extraordinarily acute powers of physical and psychological observation, even in crowded settings like London pubs, which can overwhelm most people with their buzz and din, and his “bat’s wing ear” for dialogue. I also planned to include several selections from Hamilton’s work, including an excerpt from his remarkable, underrated early “graphic novel”, Impromptu In Moribundia (which illustrates Hamilton ability to raise and transform what might be viewed as tiresome political polemic into genuinely moving story-telling and art), and the short final section of Mr. Stimson and Mr. Gorse where we leave the story of Ernest Ralph Gorse (Hamilton describes his protagonist as “the worst man in the world” and creates a riveting portrait, sustained over a long haul, of a sociopath) proper, and are suddenly placed on a different plane of convincing, frightening prophecy, which has unfortunately proved to be a largely accurate picture of European and western life. Rounding the post out would be the inclusion of several charming “author photos”, including the one showing the great man’s drawing room in his flat at The Albany in London (also home to Lord Byron, William Gladstone, Raffles, Jack Worthing, Graham Greene, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Sir Kenneth Clark, Terrence Rattigan and Terence Stamp, among other notables).

In any event, on my way to “there” (“there” being the composition and publication of the post), I ran into the following quotation about Hamilton from the English critic D.J. Taylor: 

“Every so often, though, the revulsion slips away and one is left with the joke or the sideways glance, the twitch upon the psychological thread that guarantees Hamilton a singular place as one of the great minor English novelists.”

The word and classifier “minor”, which I have seen applied untold numbers of times in various ways to artists I admire by critics I don’t, stopped me dead in my tracks. As it usually does, it made me angry for a while and arrested forward motion. I’m feeling better now and would like to say (as briefly as I can manage) that for some reason it appears that many of the artists I admire most are regularly classified as “minor”. Henry Green, who I consider to be the greatest English writer of the 20th century and an incomparable genius, has regularly been called minor. The extraordinary Ronald Firbank, author of Considering The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, a writer of peerless wit, facility and humanity (read Sorrow In Sunlight) – minor. Denton Welch, the brave, gimlet-eyed soul who achieved so much as a writer in his short life, ending with the masterpiece A Voice Through A Cloud, is generally considered minor. And Julian Maclaren-Ross, a short story writer, memoirist, critic, parodist and novelist of uncommon character and quality (and the only critic with the sense and integrity to praise Patrick Hamilton’s uniformly loathed conclusion to The Gorse Trilogy, Unknown Assailant) is , for some pitiable and misguided souls, an artist placed at the minor end of minor.

I believe (and recall being taught) that classification was a key intellectual step forward for mankind, through which we bring order to the chaos of our copious, but disheveled, direct observations of life, supposedly in a rational and effective pursuit of our desire to discern “first principles”. That being said, I haven’t encountered (as far as I can discern) the intellect, soul or any other aspect of Aristotle in critics who expel the word “minor” like a puny bullet, damning artists with faint praise in order to elevate themselves to a plane higher than their target. The practice reminds me of a remark I read the other day in a magazine article about the “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer: "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength”.

Critics apply this “major/minor” idiocy/fallacy to other arts also and I confess to having a consistent record of finding talent, value, genius and pleasure in “minor” figures across the spectrum, from the Greek poet Archilochus to the artists of the French rococo period, from the French painter Yves Tanguy to the American painter of small details, Vija Celmins, from the English expatriate songwriter and pataphysician Kevin Ayers to the American expatriate songwriter and cartoonist Peter Blegvad, both artists of surpassing talent whose “crime” against “major-ness” was simply never having had a big commercial hit. 

(Notes to probably already bored readers: 

1. I have decided to dispense with the fuller list and to give only the several examples cited above. I could go on and on. N.b. I am leaving The Kinks out of this.

2. I am a Quaker, which is, I suppose a “minor religion” in some people’s eyes, although such a conclusion would be inaccurate in any number of ways. 

3. Peter Blegvad is the author of one of the world’s longest grammatically correct palindromes. “Peel’s foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep.” MINOR? I ask you.)

In conclusion, I would like to offer my “crazy from the heat” friends (and their parents in the case of Recipe 2 below) something delicious for relief from the high temperatures and stress of it all:

Recipe 1: Papaya-Banana Smoothie

1 cup milk

1/4 cup Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 small ripe banana, peeled and sliced

1/2 large, ripe papaya, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 cup ice cubes

Combine the milk, yogurt, vanilla, banana, papaya and ice cubes in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into a large glass.

Recipe 2: Mango-Yogurt-White Rum Smoothie

2 ripe mangoes, peeled, pitted and chopped

2 cups Greek yogurt

1/2 cup mango nectar

1/2 cup white rum

Crushed ice

2 to 4 tablespoons simple syrup, depending on sweetness of mangoes

Combine mango, yogurt, nectar, rum and a few cups of crushed ice in a blender and blend until smooth and frothy. Sweeten with simple syrup, if needed. Divide among 4 glasses and serve. 

Stay cool. A toute a l'heure.