Waiting

The interview went all right I think (it's for Newstalk in Ireland, but I don't know when they'll broadcast it, if ever). A fairly straightforward interview with a guy called Sean Moncrieff, with the focus on Gilbert's character and family background. I had no notice of the questions so I was thinking on my feet mostly, trying to dredge all the information out of my brain about names and dates and so on, as well as trying to be interesting. I lost my track for a few seconds in the middle of one answer and had to backtrack.

This is the bit I don't like about what's happening with the book. I just want to fast forward to the moment when it's published and I can see what the actual reaction to the thing is. Because I think it will change the way people view Gilbert, but how can I tell before the event what they will say? After all, when Jane Stedman's great biography of Gilbert came out in 1996, Benny Green had the effrontery to say it contained nothing new!! So I mustn't think people will be predisposed to think well of my book. If it gets noticed at all (and maybe, like my last book, it will be effectively ignored) it will probably be skimmed by a bored reviewer and used as a prop for the expression of the reviewer's own opinions of Gilbert.

Why buy the book?

I need to focus my thoughts somehow. I'm being interviewed tomorrow and I need to be able to say why Gilbert deserves to be written about today and why my book deserves to be read. So why...?

Because it's the centenary of Gilbert's death this year. He died on 29 May 1911 after a life of success and defiance.

Because he deserves to be better known. He achieved so much, satire, lyrics, blah....

Because previous biographies, great though some of them are, don't provide an explanation of who Gilbert was and and the nature of his character. He tends to get simplified to a caricature of a gruff, bluff old buffer. He's usually seen at the height of his G&S fame when he was rich and comfortable. So what did he have to be grumpy about? But my book shows a different story, and a comprehensible one--a very familiar one also, I might add. Angry young man sets out writing satires against the hypocrisy and greed of his age. Gains a reputation on the strength of this. He continues to write satires against the, etc. People grow weary of the satire. Almost by chance he hits on a winning formula (with Sullivan). Fame and riches. He is no longer young, no longer angry. He becomes a pillar of the establishment that he used to mock. The angry young man is still within him, and sometimes rumbles and expresses himself, but he is almost smothered in the folds of respectability. In my view his story is a kind of tragedy of success.

Not sure if I can say this in the interview. But this is pretty much the kernel of it.

Why buy the book? It's very well written, it's entertaining, it's funny (of course it is, Gilbert was funny, and I tell a lot of the stories as well as I can). What else is there to say?

Is Gilbert still relevant?

A few days ago I was being interviewed. No details now; more later, perhaps. But one question I was asked went something like this: "Some people regard Gilbert and Sullivan as rather twee and irrelevant. What would you say to convince them otherwise?" Caught a little off guard, I said something about how G&S is still very relevant, and mentioned the still-current satire in "Utopia Limited". Afterwards, I realised I had missed the point rather. I should have said something like this....

Gilbert is one of the first "modern" humorists. His attitude is sceptical, ironic/sarcastic, and automatically anti-authority. One of the main lessons of the operas is that anyone with a high office and a flashy uniform is generally an idiot.

He also thinks human behaviour is, by and large, ridiculous and absurd. We govern our actions by selfish motives which we hide under polite forms. Sometimes we seem like clockwork automata. Life is a show, its palaces and pleasures are fantasies that fade. There is very little sense of religious faith in Gilbert. Nothing can be relied upon. Certainly the happy endings that fiction and drama drum into our heads are unreal and illusory.

If the operas seem twee and unreal, it is because he is exaggerating the conventions of drama to cartoon absurdity. The happy endings seem strained and unreal because Gilbert himself could not beleive in them, and often he seems to have made them unreal to the point of sarcasm, as in HMS Pinafore. He is a pessimistic humorist.

Maybe it's a good job that I didn't think of saying any of this in the interview....

Sadness Set to Song

I often wake up in the night, usually about four or five in the morning, and I lie in the darkness, depressing myself with gloomy thoughts about the world, and death, and the unsatisfactory aspects of my life. In my experience an interest in comedy is allied to a melancholic or depressive attitude to life. This is well known, but easily dismissed with the somewhat contemptuous phrase about the tears of the clown which everyone knows. But enough about that. Let's talk about Gilbert instead.

At the start of his career, when he was writing weekly for the comic paper Fun, he developed two comic personae: the Comic Physiognomist and Our Own Correspondent. The article "Our Own Correspondent at a Bal Masque" (29 October 1864) sees him in a highly depressed mood:

"Your correspondent is writing this article in the lowest possible spirits... he witnessed last night three hours' length of human idiocy in its most aggravating form, and... he has not yet recovered from the depression induced thereby. He has been awake all night endeavouring to argue himself into the belief that as the drivelling revellers with whom he came into contact last night were men, therefore he is nota man, but he regrets to say that he has not yet arrived at that desirable conclusion. In the meantime--until the problem is satisfactorily worked out, and he has convinced himself that he is a pig or a dog--please address communications to him as heretofore."

It is clear even from the operas that Gilbert was subject to moods of melancholia and despair. Even in The Mikado he intrudes a lyric inquiring into the mysteries of the world:

Is it but a world of trouble--

Sadness set to song?

Is its beauty but a bubble

Bound to break ere long?

Are its palaces and pleasures

Fantasies that fade?

And the glory of its treasures

Shadow of a shade?

In everything he writes there is a constant feeling that Gilbert saw life as a senseless show in which people act according to rules which make no sense. He saw life as topsyturvydom, in which people act in ways that are the direct opposite of rational good sense. Sent to Paris to report on the impending siege in 1870, he watched the Parisians and saw nothing but a pageant of absurdity.

He was in many ways a tough man, and he withstood a barrage of vicious criticism throughout his working life. But in later years certainly he began to feel somewhat bitter about the public reaction to his work, taking his frivolous nonsense to their bosom and ignoring his serious, solid work. The passing years saw the passing of his friends, and he saw himself as a tree with the leaves fallen. Every birthday was, he insisted, a cause for commiseration and not celebration. Some of his best lyrics are not in the least comic. They are meditations on this strange world of ours and our place in it.

Is life a boon?

If so, it must befall

That Death, whene'er he call,

Must call too soon.

Though fourscore years he give,

Yet one would pray to live

Another moon!

What kind of plaint have I,

Who perish in July?

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit!

Man is well done with it;

Soon as he's born

He should all means essay

To put the plague away;

And I, war-worn,

Poor captured fugitive,

My life most gladly give--

I might have had to live

Another morn!

Regarding Sir Jonathan Miller

Today, I'm going to write about something which the theatre director and Jack of all trades Sir Jonathan Miller said about Gilbert and Sullivan last year. "I've never had anything but contempt for Gilbert and Sullivan," he said in a documentary. "It's simply UKIP set to music."

For those who do not know, UKIP is a fringe political party in the UK which exists mainly in order to campaign, in defiance of all practical possibility, in favour of the UK's independence from Europe. It is generally "Little-England," right wing, and hyper-"patriotic." Hardly anyone takes it seriously.

Sir Jonathan Miller's opinion appears to have been made in ignorance of the nature of Gilbert and Sullivan. While it is true that the operas are very concerned with notions of Englishness and Britishness, the material in which this concern is expressed tends to be sarcastic and satirical in intent. Famously, the song "He is an Englishman" from HMS Pinafore is a satire on pastriotism:

For he himself has said it,

And it's greatly to his credit

That he is an Englishman!

(Chorus: That he is an Englishman!)

For he might have been a Roosian,

A French or Turk or Proosian

Or perhaps I-tal-i-an!

(Chorus: Or perhaps I-tal-i-an!)

But in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations

He remains an Englishman,

He rema-ains an E-englishman!

When Gilbert retold the story of HMS Pinafore for children late in his life, he helpfully explained the joke of this lyric in fairly plain terms: "Speaking for myself, I do not quite see that Ralph Rackstraw deserved so very much credit for reemaining an Englishman, considering that no one seems ever to have proposed to him that he should be anything else, but the crew thought otherwise and I daresay they were right."

As a general rule, whenever a character in G&S becomes patriotic, it is a signal that something heavily sarcastic is taking place. Dick Dauntless's song "I shipped, d'ye see, in a Revenue sloop" from Ruddigore is another example: the jingoistic veneer conceals a tale of English cowardice in the face of the enemy. I may add in passing that Utopia, Limited is a consistently jaundiced parable on the theme of the English assumption of superiority over other nations.

I will briefly point out that Gilbert's contemporaries recognised this aspect of his writings very well, even though they usually did not approve. The cartoonist Arthur Bryan, depicting Gilbert in a page-size collection of sketches called "Days with Celebrities: Mr W.S. Gilbert" (Moonshine, 1882), showed Gilbert arguing with John Bull and growling, "Why are you such a humbug?" while John Bull asks, "Why are you always attacking my institutions?"

Why does Sir Jonathan Miller have such a poor opinion of G&S? Perhaps his contact with The Mikado has soured him. The Mikado is not everyone's cup of tea; it is relatively straightforward and seemingly simple; its plot is simple and its attitudes are not overtly taxing. He might have understood Ruddigore better, with its quirkiness, sour cynicism, tricksiness, and peculiar storyline. He seems to have taken no effort to try and understand Gilbert's point of view, or even to take on board his ironic and sarcastic style. It is as if one took all the attitudes in Beyond the Fringe at face value.

Is comedy history?

Another Gilbert pic, this one from Fun, 17 December 1864.

This is going to be quite a brief one today, I think. All I have is a question, but an important one from my point of view I think. What do people want from entertainment? This seems to have changed radically over the years. For instance, in the first half of the 20th century a very "soft" and unpolitical kind of comedy was generally preferred in the UK--cultured and without bite, Pierrot revues and so on. After the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, something more caustic came in, the Goons and Beyond the Fringe. Still very articulate and even whimsical, but directly relating to and criticising social and political realities. In the 1980s, with "alternative" comedy, it became almost a truism that comedy is radical and offensive. It was taken as given that the point of comedy is to question and to shock for political ends.

Today, in 2011, it seems to me that the political undertow has disappeared and it is accepted that comedy shocks, and that's all it does, as an end in itself. In fact it seems sometimes that a serious or political meaning is seen as a disadvantage in comedy. Certainly the verbal and articulate aspect of comedy has been downgraded so that it is enough to state obvious and stale ideas again and again in unending repetition. The one thing that is absent is the shock of a new idea.

Is, therefore, Gilbert's comedy, which is verbal and intellectual, suitable for today? Is it even recognised as comedy, containing as it does no gross or disgusting elements, relying instead on social and intellectual games? I ask because I don't know the answer.

In the beginning

Maybe I shouldn't say too much about this at the moment, but let's just say it looks like the BBC will be doing its bit to mark the Gilbert centenary.... More later, possibly.

I have a strange between-projects feeling at the moment, though I should be pressing on with the articles to publicise the book. I am also trying to write a play (actually two plays, a biggie and a little one-acter for a local showcase called Page to Stage) and there are other distractions as well. I stayed in yesterday, intending to write, but ended up wasting practically every minute. So today I went out and I've already achieved more. For one thing, I'm writing this blog!

I've nothing to say today, so maybe I could spend ten minutes describing the origins of the Gilbert biography. I've been obsessed with the man since I was about fifteen, and for about ten years my G&S friends have been saying I should write his biography. Abut three years ago I started tinkering with the idea. I wrote a ridiculous draft of a first chapter in which I thought I could get away with skimming over his childhood and starting with the "interesting" bit, his first plays (written at the age of 30). Because the fact is that I always find the early "childhood" chapters by far the most boring part of any biography, and naively I thought they might be unnecessary in Gilbert's case because so little is known about his early years. However, as I tried to proceed on that assumption it rapidly became more and more obvious that this could not possibly work. How can you construct the building without laying the foundation? Without Gilbert's childhood, he is incomprehensible. He is a miraculous goblin without motivation or background.

But still the problem remained. If you look at the previous biographies you see that very little has been written about his childhood, and the overwhelming impression is that there is no evidence to fill in the details. But as I dug more I realised this was not really the case. David Eden's deliberately provocative book W.S. Gilbert: Appearance and Reality contains a wealth of new information (and speculation) about Gilbert's family background, though assembled in no very coherent order. For my own satisfaction (I still didn't have a book contract at this point) I tried to reassemble Eden's information in a logical order, weeding out parts that I did not feel were supported by the facts (such as his contention that Gilbert's father was an alcoholic who had admitted himself into a lunatic asylum for his own good--an interesting idea, but one with no concrete support at all except father Gilbert's own descriptions of delirium tremens and lunatic asylums, written as part of novels and researched articles).

I also found other sources of information in Gilbert's own articles. His humorous articles for Fun include a good number of evidently autobiographical fragments which, amazingly, have not been used bhy previous writers. They describe his school days, his early affections, his time working at the Education Office. Other articles illuminate such matters as his view of childhood in general--"the most miserable period of our existence" he called it, as I recall without going to the faff of checking the quotation--and his early adoration of the pantomime Harlequinade.

I tinkered with this first chapter for about a year. Then, through a process which I will not describe in detail bt which boils down to knowing someone who knew a publisher, I got my contract, and I set to work with a will. I had already amassed enough new material (from the Fun columns) to convince me that it was worth doing. I took a research trip to London, and I made an entirely new Discovery which made me realise that previous biographers really had not covered the territory as I had thought, and that there really were new things to find out about Gilbert. That's a story for later, I think. But I will say this, not going into detail. At every stage of the writing I kept finding out new things which revived my interest in the project just as it flagged. Maybe it was finding his war dispatches for The Observer, maybe it was discovering a new article by him describing his "last client", and maybe it was reading the reviews of his plays which laid bare how much some of the critics loathed him. But it all added up to create (I hope) something like one of my early ideas of what the biography should be: a kaleidoscopic view of the man from all kinds of angles, contradictory and incoherent and multi-faceted. That book would have been called Aspects of Gilbert, in case you're interested.

Another idea I had was to write a seriously eccentric biography arranged like an encyclopedia under different headings. That would have been called The Gilbert Encyclopedia: An A-Y of Gilbert. Everyone I told about that objected that with a bit of finessing I could easily find an entry or two for Z (characters in some of his plays, like Zeolide and Zayda). I don't think they realised I wanted it to be an A-Y: it would be funnier. However. The eccentric ideas fell by the wayside, and what I've ended up with is something like a conventional biography, though with the slight oddity of not attempting to be utterly comprehensive as most biographies try to be these days.

That's enough for one day.

Words and music

I don't much feel like writing at the moment, but I feel I should. I've been neglecting you (whoever you are). Yesterday I finished compiling the Index of the book and emailed it to the publishers. On Saturday I posted off the corrected proofs. So now (I hope) the real work is over, as far as I'm concerned.


Looking back at the book now, I am genuinely proud of it. There are particular chapters which I think will entertain any reader. For instance, a chapter quoting extensively from Gilbert's letters to his women friends, in which he is charming and witty. For another instance, the chapter detailing the strange circumstances of the writing, performance and banning of the political satire The Happy Land. Gilbert and Sullivan diehards will pore over the chapter on Iolanthe, which quotes from Gilbert's plot books for the opera to an extent never before seen and so is able to show how his ideas developed from crude beginnings to what I consider the perfection of the final result.


I have been occupied in finishing with the book, and that is one reason why I haven't been writing blog posts for the past few days. There have been things I've wanted to write about, but I've lost the impetus for the moment.


But there is one thing I want to say. It's sometimes said that Gilbert's words overwhelm Sullivan's music, that the music is always forced into second position. But this is not always the case. I can point to instances where Gilbert's words are a transparent frame for the music (that is, music and words have the traditional operatic relationship). Take "Oh, Goddess Wise" from Princess Ida, for instance. Read the words, and listen to the song being sung. The words are chosen to serve the needs of the composer:

Oh, goddess wise
That lovest light,
Endow with sight
Their unillumined eyes.
At this my call,
A fervent few
Have come to woo
The rays that from thee fall.

This is as far from the usual idea of Gilbert and Sullivan as it is possible to get. The efforts of the Sullivan experts have quite rightly succeeded in persuading us that there is more to Sullivan than the G&S stereotype of patter songs, but we are still supposed to pretend that Gilbert was simply the patter man we all think we know. Sondheim certainly thinks that's all Gilbert was. But don't let me start on that one again.