The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
Any actor hoping to take on Henry VIII has first got to reckon with Sid James
Ididn’t watch the Anne Boleyn thing. Did you? The Channel 5 miniseries everyone was talking about? I just figured there wasn’t going to be much suspense in it. All you have to do is remember the rhyme. Divorced, #spoileralert, died.
That’s not to say I don’t like a bit of Henry VIII. He’s everyone’s favourite king. All fat and licentious and dripping with gold. Ask anyone who their favourite king is. If they say anything but “Henry VIII” then they’re just pretending in order to sound more interesting, like people who eat veal for Christmas dinner or claim to like the Stones more than the Beatles. Stuff and nonsense. Turkey, Here Comes the Sun,
Henry VIII.
I’m a fan of the textbook Charles Laughton performance from 1933, which was so memorable a stamp on the old king that restaurateurs “hilariously” served Laughton whole chickens with no cutlery for the rest of his life. (I don’t know why I used inverted commas there. It is hilarious.)
Nevertheless, I also loved
Wolf Hall: Henry reinvented as the flame-haired, powerful
Damian Lewis alongside compelling, whispery Mark Rylance as Cromwell.
But in a massive upset for the bookies, Damian Lewis isn’t the hottest ever Henry, due to Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s volatile, glittery-eyed turn in The Tudors.
I once saw Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Selfridges, swaying at the till, quite the worse for wear. But enough about me.
Best ever Henry VIII? Obviously that’s Sid James. No contest there: 1971, Carry On Henry (“Has she been chaste?”, “All over Normandy”). Laughton, Lewis, Robert Shaw, many of the greats have offered their Henries but all must accept there’s no beating
Sid James. That’s probably true in every role he assayed. I doubt Laurence Olivier could have done a better job with the part of Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond.
Daniel Day-Lewis could not have improved on Sid’s Bert Handy or Vic Flange. John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Marlon Brando: none of these could have held a candle as Gladstone Screwer.
The only tragedy is that Sid James died before giving the world his Lear. I think we can all imagine what he might have done with, “Blow winds and crack your cheeks!”
Anyway, I’ve never seen a Henry VIII I didn’t like, so I expect Mark Stanley, in the miniseries* Anne Boleyn, was perfectly appetising. But I deduced from the title that it was mainly about Anne Boleyn, and I knew what was going to happen to her, so I didn’t want to see a massively humanised version that would make me feel all empathetic and sad.
*(This was three parts, so a proper miniseries. Since last week, when I ranted about Mare of Easttown being defined as a miniseries when it’s seven episodes long, the “Best Miniseries” award at the Baftas was won by the 12-part I May Destroy You. Twelve parts! I am watching that series at the moment, and wonderful it is too, but 12 episodes are no more a miniseries than a “Big Mac Meal” is a snack!)
I feel sorry for the people involved in Anne Boleyn that there’s been so much bitchiness about it. I bet it’s pretty good. There’s an infuriating tendency, in the current culture, to pronounce something “hit” or “miss” in an immediate and absurdly binary way – hence photographs of the women at the Bafta ceremony in pretty dresses captioned “hit” or “miss” (or “fashiontastic”/“dresstastrophe”) with a methodology that, to people like you and me who notice only that everyone’s looking smart and nervous and we hope they have a nice evening, seems arbitrary and baffling. It all started with Facebook likes, I reckon. And that stupid myth about Marmite.
Thus, the makers of Anne Boleyn must have waited anxiously to see if they’d be the new Crown or Downton, only to wake up and find they’re the new Myra Hindley. Only for a week, or course. The first meaningless noise will die down, the miniseries will stay on “catch-up”, and soon enough its fans will be recommending it happily for the normal level of enjoyment it should get.
Meanwhile, I opted for a more modern depiction of marital strife: The Split. That enormously likeable actor Stephen Mangan mentioned, in an interview to promote his new children’s book, that he’s about to start work on the third series of this drama about a family of hotshot (and indeed hot) divorce lawyers.
I’d never seen The Split. Using my Line of Duty logic from a few weeks ago, I decided that if there’s clamour for a third series then it must be worth going back to the beginning and giving it a spin. This is the plus side of all that splurgy downloading of telly-hours on to the internet: you never miss anything, it’s all still lurking there somewhere.
This one might be a tiny bit soapy for me, though if you like it then you will go NUTS for The Good Wife, a long-running American legal drama which seems like it might have inspired someone on The Split. If you can’t find it online, I will stick my neck out and say it is worth investing in a set of DVDs. I really love that show.
The Split has a similar Americanstyle dynamism: a lot of talkingand-walking and fabulous views from shiny rooms. And the cast is magnificent! Nicola Walker, Stephen Tompkinson, Meera
Syal… it’s impossible not to enjoy being in these people’s company.
Having said that, obviously
Sid James would have been better in every role. Especially the sexy sister.
He’s everyone’s favourite king. All fat and licentious and dripping with gold
but also an internal logic that seems completely unarguable at the time, but only half-cogent when we wake; further, an ability to change register suddenly without announcing the change, and without our being troubled by it.
“The Death of Justina”, one of his most famous stories, moves, in the space of fewer than 20 pages, through grave reverie on the hazard of life, puckish reflections on the state and origin of America, satirical business about office life and zoning regulations, pathetic details of the death of an elderly aunt, comic details about the same, wry thoughts on giving up smoking, a phantasmagorical dream, and angry expostulation on the nature of death and the unwillingness of others to spot it. The story switches from one tone to another with the untroubled transitions of dreaming, though we never doubt that this is a string of real events.
Or take “The Swimmer”. Neddy Merrill, a man in early middle age, at a Sunday afternoon neighbourhood party, decides to swim the eight miles home via all the private (and one public) pools he knows. It sounds like a harmless suburban whim and perhaps a picaresque short story. This first pool he dives into, that of his hosts, is fed by an artesian well: “To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition.” To begin with, the day is sunny and the neighbours welcoming; but gradually pool-owners become more indifferent, the summer seems to turn to autumn, Neddy’s memory of his friends and acquaintances becomes less reliable, he encounters unexpected hostility and enigmatic remarks about his own life; his muscles seem to grow weaker, his stroke feebler, and when finally he arrives home, he discovers that his house is dilapidated, locked and abandoned.
Is he swimming from a “natural condition” to a social one; is he swimming from the present into his future life, or into a gradual realisation of the truth about his existing life? Is he swimming from metaphor into truth, or from truth into metaphor? Something transcendent is going on, though if transcendence means spiritual enhancement, perhaps it is a reverse transcendence that he is swimming into. Here, certainly, is the density that Cheever sought.
In 1975 Cheever examined a short story anthology “from which
I have been conspicuously excluded”, and agreed with the editors: what they had chosen was “more substantial and correct than my flighty, eccentric, and sometimes bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains”. Sometimes Cheever appears to be writing satire, and sometimes he is. But he reserves the right to shift register and tone at will, if only for a sentence. And, often, something weirder is going on. Stories may end with a shimmer of the fantastical or the otherworldly. “The Country Husband”, for example, is a seemingly realistic story of disharmony, rage and sin among a typical suburban family. After a catalogue of disruptive and potentially lethal events, the family arrives back to (almost) the moral place where it was at the beginning; and everybody retires to bed. Whereupon the final sentence erupts: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” And is that just another dream? It is certainly much more than an authorial whim: Cheever had the line in his head before he even had the story.
In 1972 Cheever flew home from Iowa via Chicago with a Pan Am stewardess either seated beside him or in close attendance: “At the end of the flight she embraced me ardently and said: ‘You are one of the most charming and interesting men I have ever met and by far the craziest.’ She wore a red cape.” A lesser writer might have started off with “a Pan Am stewardess in a red cape”; Cheever delays this sartorial detail until after the anecdote’s supposed kicker, which turns it into a poignant and amusing detail. As his children testified, he was always – in life as in fiction – a comic and subversive presence. He once described himself as “the sort of iconoclast… who will ridicule the establishment endlessly and expect to be seated at the head of the table”. In 1977 the New York Times asked him to comment on the 100th anniversary of Peter Rabbit. Cheever replied, “My money
has always been on Mr McGregor.”
Cheever’s restless, divided spirit, which caused him much grief, sought the usual sources of temporary escape and temporary coherence: sex and drink. But for the longer term? In 1955 he wrote of his life: “It seems to me that I try to repair a web that is always broken; that with every reparation I find that a new part has been broken or kicked loose.” If you have violent thesis and antithesis in your life, where do you find synthesis? In one of two ways: you hope for it in God, or you create it for yourself in art. Cheever was a diligent social churchgoer rather than a writer with an active theology. So for him, the saviour and the synthesis could only be literature:
I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm the feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is purposefully put upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.
‘I retaliate by having a homosexual escapade, unconsummated, with Ronald Reagan’
Cheever hoped, in the final words of the final story in his 1961 collection Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, “to celebrate a world that lies about us like a bewildering and stupendous dream”. The same story features “my laconic old friend Royden Blake”, a writer who in mid-life finds, and is spoiled by, success and money. As a result, “In his pages one found alcoholics, scarifying descriptions of the American landscape, and fat parts for Marlon Brando. You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear’s innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon’s tail moving over the dead leaves.”
Writers often invent other writers who exemplify their own secret fears; and Cheever was no exception. He certainly had more than a quorum of alcoholics in his fiction, and though he wrote no fat parts for Marlon Brando, he found that he had, without knowing it, written a fat part for Burt Lancaster. But for all his chaotic life and self-destructive drinking, his working brain retained a sober clarity: he never harmed the ear’s innermost chamber, and he always heard the swish of the dragon’s tail.