The Pixie in the Armchair

My book, Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, has an epigraph, a quotation from the Czech writer Karel Capek:

"... the English also contain pixies. They are enormously solemn, solid and venerable; suddenly there is a sort of rumbling within them, they make a grotesque remark, a fork of pixie-like humour flies out fo them, and once more they have the solemn appearance ofan old leather armchair."

Unfortunately this has been hidden away in the book a bit, on the reverse of the title page; and it's been put directly underneath the dedication, so that a casual reader might mistake it as referring to the dedicatee; but it is, in my mind, an important part of the book, and it is intended as a key to Gilbert's character.

I think it illuminates a vital part of English character, certainly as it used to be: that combination of surface respectability and normality and boringness, and underneath it all a broad streak of anarchy. Gilbert was a stolid middle-class man with a passion for money as a gauge of worth; but his mind was filled with fairies and absurdities, and the imaginative part of him despised the money-grubbing that his everyday self was so concerned with. Maybe that partly explains the anger that underlies so much of his work.

Has the English character changed? Do we still have that combination of reticence and anarchy, or has it been destroyed in two world wars and the sixties revolution and the hoodlumism of the eighties? Is the anarchism now all outward-facing and visible to the world? Have the pixies been let loose from the armchairs? Personally I feel like a rather old-fashioned English person such as Capek had met in England in the 1930s. I have a strong tendency to conform, to do as I am told; but when I write there is a savage other half that tends to show itself sooner or later. And somehow this seems to me to be how things should be.

Gilbert's Glory

This week, on the run up to the Centenary (29 May), I suddenly seem to be everywhere. I was interviewed for a series which is on BBC Radio 4 all this week, Gilbert's Glory--an excellent set of programmes with a good range of talking heads and a proper celebratory tone. I almost cheered when Mike Leigh said, clearly and boldly, that Gilbert should be in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey! His tone was defiant enough to make it a talking point if we want.

I guess it may be possible that people will find this blog if they're looking for info about my biopgraphy after hearing the programme. Possible, not probable. But just in case, yes, my name is Andrew Crowther, and yes, I have written a new biography of Gilbert (some of the new info is used in Gilbert's Glory). The book's title is Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan (hence the blog title). It's a really good book and you should buy it now and if you're a journalist you should review it now. Favourably. You can find it on Amazon here.

On Monday I did my talk at the Redbridge Book and Media Festival, at Hainault Library. A good turnout--about 30--and the talk went well, with a very lively Q&A session afterwards. Nick Dobson, who organised the event, is lovely and charming. We drove there and back; by the end of Tuesday I was exhausted, even though it was my girlfriend who was driving!

A discussion which I had with Thos Ribbits and Jerry Pinel back in April is now available as a podcast. I haven't had the courage to listen to it yet, but I remember it as being very lively.

Well, all this is very nice and gratifying. If there's nothing about the book in the papers this weekend I'll a) get very depressed; b) feel angry and frustrated; c) not feel very surprised; and d) publish here some of the material which I have offered to a famous Sunday paper without them even bothering to reply.